Modular Terrain Systems for Wargaming: Dwarven Forge, Mantic & Battle Systems

Before you compare systems, answer the question that decides your budget: how much table do you have to cover? The long-standing wargaming rule of thumb is that roughly a quarter to a third of the playing surface should carry terrain — enough to give cover, block line of sight, and create the choke points that make a game tactical, but not so much that armies can't maneuver. On a standard 6×4 table that's about six 12×12 inch zones of meaningful scenery, not a wall-to-wall diorama.

This matters because it reframes the price tags below. You are not buying enough Dwarven Forge to tile an entire battlefield — that would cost four figures and nobody does it. You're buying enough to hit the quarter-coverage mark with pieces that earn their place. That's why the smart layered approach almost always wins: a cheap base layer (Mantic or Battle Systems) that fills the bulk of the table, with a few premium hero pieces (Dwarven Forge resin, a WizKids centerpiece) placed where the camera and the action both land.

So the honest first move is to measure your table, mentally divide it into 12-inch squares, and decide how many of those squares need to be 'busy.' Buy to that number. Most new wargamers wildly over-buy on their first order, then discover half of it never leaves the box. Hit coverage first, upgrade pieces second.

Dwarven Forge pieces are cast in Dwarvenite, a proprietary dense PVC that holds crisp sculpted detail and shrugs off the abuse a real game table dishes out — drops, transport, sleeves, dice rolling across it for years. They arrive hand-painted and table-ready, and they quietly set the visual standard at the table: cheaper scatter around them suddenly reads as 'part of the same world.' The tradeoff is cost. A single core set runs roughly $48–$131 unpainted or $67–$167 painted, and you are buying force multipliers, not a whole battlefield.

Here's the insider truth most buyers learn the hard way: the unpainted route is a real hobby commitment, not a shortcut. Dwarvenite is fussy about paint — many hobby acrylics dry tacky on it. The company's own line, Pokorny Artist Colours, was formulated specifically for the material and needs no primer; if you prime anyway, Army Painter spray is the one most painters report working cleanly. Natural-hair brushes beat synthetics on the dense surface. If you don't want that project, buy painted and never look back.

The other quiet advantage is resale. Dwarven Forge rotates sets in and out of production and retires lines permanently. Retired and Kickstarter-exclusive sets hold value and often trade hands on the secondary market years later — a complete collection is closer to an asset than a sunk cost. Few terrain systems can say that.

Mantic's Terrain Crate uses pre-colored push-fit cardboard buildings joined by small plastic connector clips — straight clips for flat joins, corner clips that tuck inside the corners so they don't show. No glue. A single Fantasy set runs about £18–£80 (roughly $22–$100), and the whole premise is reconfiguration: two identical sets become a village one week and a ruined compound the next, then clip apart for storage.

The system rewards a few habits the box won't tell you. First, clean the connectors off the sprue and shave any nub before first use — they seat far more snugly and stop looking 'gamey' once the ports sit flush. Second, expect some panels to arrive slightly warped; if the bottom corners of a wall or door aren't anchored to a floor panel or a neighbor, they'll bow and refuse to line up. Build from a secured base outward and the warp disappears. Third, you can deliberately use a tight connector as a friction point to make a removable section — a roof you lift, a wall you knock down mid-game.

Mantic is the right call if you want a full table's worth of terrain under $200, if you change layouts game-to-game, or if you're outfitting a club table where pieces get rearranged constantly. The cardboard won't outlast resin across a decade of heavy weekly play, but for variety-per-dollar nothing here touches it.

Battle Systems ships terrain flat-packed on medium-thick, full-color-on-both-sides card. You punch the pieces from the board, clip and lightly glue where needed, and you're playing — buildings have removable roofs and printed interiors, so a watchtower isn't a solid block, it's a room you can fight inside. A core set runs about $98–$110 and covers a 6×4 table on its own. No priming, no painting, no magnetizing, no hobby hours.

The trick that separates a Battle Systems table that looks great in year three from one that frays in month two is edge treatment, and almost nobody does it out of the box. The white core shows on every punched edge; run a coloring pen along those edges — brown or grey to match, never black, which reads as a hard cartoon outline — and the cardboard illusion all but vanishes. For high-wear pieces, brush a thin line of liquid superglue along the edges: it cures into a hard plastic-like shell that stops fraying and delamination cold. When punching pieces out, hold the card on both sides of the cut and keep an exacto knife handy for the stubborn tabs, so you never tear a corner.

Do that twenty-minute prep and Battle Systems stops being 'the cardboard option' and becomes a clean, durable, genuinely good-looking table for a fraction of resin money. Skip it, and the edges will tell on you.

Modularity sounds like a pure good until you realize it's a tradeoff against coherence. Dwarven Forge pieces share compatible geometry and attach magnetically to each other and to Terrain Trays — you can blend dungeons, cities, caverns, and mountains into one continuous, believable world, and a pro move is to build vertically, propping floor tiles on corner pieces to stack two or three levels for impact a flat map never gets. The constraint is theme: it's coherent because it's curated.

Mantic sits at the opposite pole — near-infinite reconfiguration of any two compatible panels, which is exactly why club and variety players love it. Battle Systems lands in the middle: pieces connect logically (wall to wall, building to building) and each core set is really a fixed scene you arrange by geography rather than a tile kit you remix endlessly, though à-la-carte expansions widen it.

The decision is really one question: do you want one perfect table, or ten different ones? If you run a long narrative campaign on a permanent table, thematic coherence (Dwarven Forge, or a WizKids centerpiece) beats raw flexibility. If you're a tournament or club player rebuilding every week, Mantic's reconfiguration is worth more than any paint job. A practical hedge most veterans land on: a Mantic or Battle Systems base for coverage and reconfiguration, plus two or three Dwarven Forge hero pieces that anchor the eye and travel between every layout.

Terrain you can't store or carry is terrain you stop using — this is the quiet factor that decides what survives in your collection. Battle Systems wins on storage outright: it flat-packs back into its own box, so an entire 6×4 table's worth collapses to a couple of inches on a shelf. If space is your binding constraint — apartment, shared table, no hobby room — that advantage is hard to overstate.

For transport and endurance, Dwarven Forge's Dwarvenite density is the premium you're actually paying for. It rides to the game store or convention and back without chipping, and the optional magnetic Terrain Trays lock pieces down so a setup survives a bumpy car trip intact. Heavy, yes — and that weight is the one real downside, because shipping a large order is dense and can add meaningfully to the total (verify it before you check out).

Mantic sits in between. The cardboard is light and easy to carry, but the connector clips can loosen or crack under heavy repeated use; the upside is replacements are cheap and available, so a worn club set is a $5 fix, not a write-off. The honest summary: if you haul terrain weekly, Dwarven Forge's durability earns its keep; if you store more than you transport, Battle Systems' flat-pack is the smarter buy; Mantic is the flexible middle that asks for a little upkeep.

Run the real numbers. A Dwarven Forge wargaming setup — one or two core sets plus scatter — totals about $200–$400. Mantic fills a 6×4 table with multiple sets and connector packs for roughly $200–$300. Battle Systems' Fantasy Battlefield Core Set ($98–$110) covers a whole table alone, with à-la-carte pieces to extend it. WizKids 4D Settings centerpieces land around $50–$150 each. On pure speed-to-a-playable-table, Battle Systems and Mantic clear the bar fastest.

But the move that saves new wargamers the most money is not picking one system — it's layering them. Buy your bulk coverage cheap (Battle Systems or Mantic) to hit that quarter-of-the-table density, then spend on two or three premium hero pieces where it counts: a Dwarven Forge ruin or a WizKids bridge at the table's focal point. The eye reads the expensive piece, the cheap base does the heavy lifting, and you've spent a third of an all-resin table for ninety percent of the impact.

One more buyer's note on Dwarven Forge specifically: its lowest prices historically come through Kickstarter campaigns, not the retail store, and the company has built that funding model since its $2M debut campaign — backers routinely pay well under eventual retail. If a DF set you want is mid-campaign, that's the moment to buy. If terrain is a decade-long investment you'll revisit, the resin justifies the step up; if you're still learning what you actually use week to week, start cheap and upgrade the pieces you reach for most.