Terrain: Renedra American Church Kit Review

Following on from my previous post about my graveyard terrain set, the main piece on that board is going to be a church.  The building I will be using is by Renedra:

It suitable for all times periods from 1750 onwards it says on the box so it fits in well with Malifaux (which is set in 1902).  The cost of the item is around £18.  The box contains the sprues only, with the build instructions on the back of the box:

Inside we get 5 sprues.  The first three are the church itself:

The top and left sprues in the picture are identical, being the two sides of the church.  The sprue at the bottom is the front part of the building.  The details on the outside is nice.  The reverse of the pieces in smooth so don't expect a hugely detailed interior section.  There's also a couple of gravestones included on the sprue.

Also in the box are two sprues of picket fencing (100cm worth according to the box):

That's a nice added bonus and can easily be used to make a enclosed space next to the church or mounted separately.

Building the church was very simple, I managed to put it together in about 45 minutes.  There's very minimal mould lines throughout so the cleanup was simple.  The only part you need to pay attention to is putting the bell into place before spire floor.  This is clearly shown on the box.

The crow is taken from the Renedra Graveyard kit I talked about in a previous post.

I based the model on a couple of 5mm foam core pieces, the bottom one larger than the upper one then stuck them on a hardboard base which gives the model a little bit more height.  Groundwork was built up with DAS modelling clay, gravel and sand:

The paint job was pretty easy, the weatherboarding was just drybrushed khaki and then a lighter blend of khaki and then any wood picked out in brown:

Overall I like this kit very much.  It makes an excellent centre piece for the table and it was easy to build and paint.  The scale is a tiny bit off for Malifaux, maybe a couple of millimetres too small but it still works fine for what I want.

Terrain: Renedra Grave Stones Kit Review

I'm going to be running the Malifaux tournament at Vapnartak this year (the one that I fluked my way to winning last year) and so I'm building terrain.  Lots of terrain...

One of the boards I'm doing is going to be a graveyard board.  The centre piece will be a church which I will talk about in a future post.  Naturally, there will also be alot of gravestones required for this.  I toyed around with making some but I wanted them look decent so I went for buying some.

I settled on the gravestones set from Renedra which set me back a total of £9.50 shipped off eBay.  You can pick up the same set from elsewhere as well including Wayland Games.

They arrived pretty fast.  The packaging for these from Renedra was nothing special so I didn't bother photographing it:  it was a plastic bag with a piece of card at the top.  Inside you get two identical sprues:

I've flipped them over so the back of the sprue is on the left in the picture here.  There's a total of around 40 gravestones of various types on here and a couple of crows which are a nice finishing touch.

The detail on the front of the stones is nice, they have inscriptions, RIP that kind of thing.  The back of them is a little disappointing though.  A couple of them have some detail on the reverse (just a stone texture and a crack) but the rest of totally flat.  The backs need some work to get them to look decent.

Clean up and build-wise they were easy to do with minimal mould lines, just a few marks where they are attached to the sprue.  I took a knife and file to the back of mine to add some texture to the reverse of them and also added some patches of sand which I painted up to look like lichen.

I've based mine in small groups on MDF board and built up the groundwork around them with air drying modelling clay:

The bases were then textured with some basic sand and gravel to add some interest to them.  I glued some small patches of rocks (a mixture of model railway ballast and fine gravel) in patches and then added sand to the rest of the bases.

Paint jobs were very easy:  Primed with brown spray paint (Maple for Rover cars from Halfords), painted various greys for the stones mostly Vallejo's Heavy Gray with some brown/black washes applies then drybrushed:

The bases were finished off with some green flock and tufts.

Here's the graveyard master himself surveying his domain:

Overall, I really liked this kit.  They've painted up really nicely and I think they'll look good on my graveyard board.