Designing a Downtown Retail District for Modern Skirmish

A downtown retail district is one of the best boards you can own for modern skirmish gaming. It is dense enough to force hard movement decisions, open enough that shooting still matters, and instantly readable to anyone who sits down at the table. Storefronts, sidewalks and parked cars need no explanation — everyone knows what a shop window is, and everyone immediately understands that the alley behind it is dangerous.

This guide walks through designing one from scratch: what to buy first, how to lay it out, and how to keep the whole district looking like a single place rather than a shelf of unrelated buildings. It applies equally to Marvel: Crisis Protocol, The Walking Dead: All Out War, Reality's Edge, Zona Alfa, modern Spectre Operations, and any home-brew ruleset played on a 3x3 or 4x4 board.

Start with the street, not the buildings

The most common mistake is buying buildings first and figuring out the streets afterwards. Do it the other way around. Decide your street width before anything else, because street width is what actually controls how the game plays.

A good rule for 28mm to 32mm skirmish: main streets should be roughly 6 to 8 inches wide, side streets 4 inches, and alleys 2 to 3 inches. That gives you a clear hierarchy. Main streets become killing grounds that models cross at their peril. Alleys become the flanking routes that reward players who plan two turns ahead. If every gap on your table is the same width, every movement decision feels the same, and the board goes flat fast.

Lay masking tape on a bare table and block out your grid before a single kit arrives. You will be surprised how few buildings it actually takes to fill a 3x3 once the streets are properly sized.

Storefronts are the backbone

Retail buildings do something no generic block does: they give the table a front and a back. A storefront has a glass-heavy public face on the street and a blank service face on the alley. That asymmetry creates natural cover variation without any special rules — the shop side offers windows to shoot through, the alley side offers solid concrete to hide behind.

Our Modern Retail Store Terrain Set of three storefront buildings is designed exactly for this job. Three shops in a row read instantly as a commercial strip, and because they print at 28mm, 32mm and 40mm, you can match whatever heroic scale your game system uses. Set them shoulder to shoulder along one long table edge and you have half your district done in a single purchase.

If you want more variety in the row, mix in a couple of taller mixed-use blocks behind the shops. Retail on the ground floor and apartments above is how real downtown cores are built, and it gives you elevation without needing a dedicated skyscraper.

Fill the middle with a mixed cityscape

Once you have a retail strip, you need the rest of downtown to surround it. The 28mm Urban Cityscape Terrain bundle with five buildings and four vehicles is the fastest way to get there. The vehicles matter more than people expect — parked cars are the single best piece of urban scatter in the game. They break line of sight at exactly waist height, they make streets feel occupied rather than empty, and they give you obvious objective markers when a scenario needs one.

Place vehicles along the kerb rather than in the middle of the road. Cars stacked down both sides of a main street narrow the effective firing lane without physically blocking it, which is exactly the tension you want in a shooting-heavy game.

Push the edges outward

Real downtown districts do not end at a table edge; they thin out into lower buildings. If you want your district to feel like part of a larger city, use lower-density housing along one or two board edges. The Modern Suburbia Terrain Bundle of six buildings works well here, and it doubles the value of the collection: on a different night, those same houses become their own suburban board.

For an even more small-town feel, the Urban Suburbia Bundle with houses, a church, a gas station and a mini mart gives you civic landmarks that anchor scenarios. A gas station is a fantastic objective. So is a church — it is the tallest thing for blocks and everybody wants the steeple.

Design for objectives, not just for looks

A district that looks great but plays as a symmetrical grid gets boring by game three. When you finalise your layout, deliberately build in three kinds of space:

A contested centre. One intersection or plaza that both players want and neither can hold safely. Keep it fairly open so holding it costs something.

Two safe approaches. Alleys or building interiors that let a slower, tougher model cross the board without being shot to pieces. Without these, ranged forces dominate every game.

One elevated position. A rooftop or upper floor that overlooks the main street. It should be strong but reachable — if only one player can access it, the board is unbalanced.

Making it look like one city

Kits from different sets will read as one place if you do three things consistently. Use the same base grey or asphalt tone on every ground-floor exterior. Apply the same wash across all buildings so shadows match. And pick two or three accent colours — say a faded red, a mustard yellow and a sun-bleached teal — and use only those for signage, doors and awnings across every kit. Colour discipline unifies a table far more effectively than matching architecture does.

For the streets themselves, a simple grey painted board with drybrushed edges and a few chalk-pastel oil stains does the job. Do not overdetail the road surface; it sits under the models and competes with them for attention.

A realistic first purchase

If you are starting cold, buy the retail set and one cityscape bundle. That is roughly eight buildings and a handful of vehicles — enough for a proper 3x3 skirmish board with real streets. Add suburbia later when you want to expand to 4x4 or want a second board type.

All Northern Foundry terrain ships as unpainted printed kits, so you get to make the painting and basing calls yourself. Assemble the district first, play a game on bare plastic, and only then commit to a colour scheme. You will make better choices once you have seen how the table actually plays.