Adding Verticality: Elevated Walkways & Rooftop Combat

Most tabletop cities are built flat. Buildings go down on the mat, models walk around them, and the whole game plays out on a single plane with a few blocked lines of sight. It works — but it wastes the single best tool an urban board has: height. The moment you add a second and third playable level, movement stops being a two-dimensional problem and becomes a puzzle of ramps, chokepoints, jump-down risks and overwatch angles.

This guide covers how to build vertical layers into a 28mm or 40mm board using modular printed terrain — how high to go, how to keep it stable, and how to make sure the upper deck actually gets used instead of sitting there as scenery.

Why Verticality Changes the Game

On a flat board, the shortest path between two objectives is almost always a straight line, and cover is a binary question: is something in the way or not? Add elevation and three things happen immediately.

First, the map gets bigger without getting wider. A 4x4 table with a full walkway network has roughly a third more usable surface area. That matters enormously for skirmish games where a 3x3 or 4x4 is standard.

Second, sightlines become directional. A model on a rooftop sees over most scatter but is silhouetted against the sky. A model in the street below is protected from horizontal fire but exposed to anything above. Suddenly board position has a vertical component and players have to choose.

Third, access points become objectives in themselves. Stairs, ladders and ramps are the only ways up. Control the stairs and you control the level. This is where a lot of the best tactical play in games like Infinity, Kill Team and Cyberpunk RED actually lives.

Start With a Spine, Not Scattered Platforms

The most common mistake with vertical terrain is building islands — a few rooftops that models can reach but not travel between. A model that climbs up, shoots once, and has to climb back down is not using the upper level; it is just standing on a box.

Instead, build a spine: a continuous elevated route that crosses a meaningful portion of the table. The Cyberpunk Elevated Transit Bundle is designed exactly for this job — trainline sections plus modular stairs and walkways that connect into a single run. Because the stairs and walkway pieces are separate components, you can plan the spine first and then decide where the access points go, rather than being stuck with wherever a monolithic kit puts them.

A good target on a 4x4: one continuous elevated route with three to four access points, at least one of which is contested or awkward to reach. Fewer than three and the upper level is a death trap nobody enters. More than five and it stops being a chokepoint at all.

Getting the Height Right

Height is not a case of higher-is-better. For 28mm play, an elevated deck sitting roughly 60–80mm above the table is the sweet spot. That is high enough to break line of sight to ground-level models behind cover, and high enough that falling matters in most rulesets, but low enough that you can still comfortably reach in with your hands to move models underneath.

If you play 40mm heroic scale, scale that up proportionally — closer to 90–110mm — and be aware that clearance underneath becomes the limiting factor. A walkway you cannot reach under is a walkway that slows the game down every single turn.

A practical test: place your tallest model under the deck, then try to pick it up with two fingers without disturbing anything. If you cannot, raise the deck or shorten that span.

Monorail Lines as Terrain and as Story

A suspended transit line does something that plain walkways cannot: it gives your board an obvious narrative axis. Players instantly understand a monorail. It tells them where the city centre is, which side is industrial, and where the fighting is likely to funnel.

The Cyberpunk Suspended Monorail kit uses modular OpenLOCK track, which means you can run it straight across the board, curve it around a corner, or terminate it at a station platform depending on the scenario. Two layout patterns worth trying:

The diagonal cut. Run the line corner to corner. This splits both deployment zones asymmetrically and forces at least one flank to commit early. Good for objective-grab missions.

The central artery. Run it straight down the middle of the table with stations at each end. This creates a high-value contested corridor and rewards whoever takes the elevated ground first. Good for kill-team style attrition games.

Interiors Count as Verticality Too

Rooftops are the obvious vertical space, but a building with playable internal floors adds vertical depth in a much tighter footprint — and it plays very differently. Interior levels mean short-range fights, doorway chokepoints and models stacked directly on top of each other.

The Cyberpunk Chatsubo Bar with removable floors is a good example of the pattern to look for. Removable floors are non-negotiable for interior play — if you cannot lift the roof and the upper floor off cleanly, you cannot place or measure models inside, and the interior becomes decorative. Look for kits that are designed to come apart, not kits that merely have windows.

Placed next to a walkway spine, a multi-floor building becomes a vertical junction: ground floor, interior stairs, roof, then out onto the walkway network. That is three distinct engagement ranges in one 6-inch square of table.

Filling the Ground Level

Verticality only reads properly if the ground level still feels like a city. A board of tall structures over empty mat looks like a climbing frame. You want a dense street layer underneath so that models below have somewhere to hide, and so the elevated route is a genuine choice rather than the only sensible path.

A mixed-building set like the 28mm Urban Cityscape Terrain set with five buildings and four vehicles does this well — the vehicles in particular are excellent under-walkway filler, breaking up sightlines at model height without adding another tall silhouette. Park them at the base of stair access points and the climb becomes a fight rather than a formality.

Practical Assembly Notes

All of these are physical printed kits that arrive unpainted, so a few build-stage decisions pay off later:

Do not glue the whole spine together. Keep walkway runs in two or three sub-assemblies. A single 4-foot glued span is impossible to store and impossible to reconfigure for a different scenario.

Weight the supports. Elevated terrain is top-heavy by nature. A few coins or steel washers epoxied into the base of each support column will stop a knocked elbow from taking out your whole transit line mid-game.

Paint the underside. It is the surface players look at most, because they spend the game peering under the walkways at the models below. A quick dark basecoat with some rust streaking is enough.

Prime and paint before final assembly. Walkway undersides and interior stairwells are almost impossible to reach with a brush once everything is clipped together.

Start Small

You do not need a full skyline to get the benefit. One elevated run across a third of the table, with two stair access points and a multi-floor building at one end, is enough to change how a game plays. Build that, play three or four games on it, and you will know exactly where the second run should go.