How to Build a City Block for Marvel Crisis Protocol

Marvel Crisis Protocol lives and dies on its city blocks. The game rewards verticality, blocked line of sight, and dense cover that lets a low-mobility bruiser close the gap while a flyer leaps rooftops overhead. A flat table with a few crates simply does not give you the tactical texture the rules are built around. The good news: you do not need to sculpt anything from scratch. With the right urban terrain kits, you can assemble a board-ready downtown in an afternoon. This guide walks through choosing scale, laying out a single city block, and dressing it for play.

Why a city block matters in Marvel Crisis Protocol

MCP is played on a 3' x 3' board, which sounds small until you try to fit a meaningful skirmish onto it. Because the standard board is compact, every building you place has an outsized effect on movement lanes and sight lines. A proper city block does three things: it breaks the table into corridors and intersections, it creates multi-level fighting positions for characters with Flight or Wall Crawler, and it gives objectives a believable home. When your Spider-Man perches on a third-floor ledge and your Red Skull skulks behind a parked sedan, the terrain is doing real work — not just decorating the table.

Choosing your scale: 28mm or 40mm heroic?

This is the question that trips up most new MCP players. Atomic Mass Games sculpts its miniatures in roughly 40mm heroic scale, meaning they are noticeably chunkier than the traditional 28mm figures used in many skirmish games. If you want buildings that feel proportioned to your models — doors your characters can plausibly fit through, vehicles they tower over correctly — you generally want the 40mm heroic variant of a terrain kit.

That said, plenty of players happily run 28mm urban terrain with MCP. The slightly smaller buildings read as "distant skyline" cover and keep more of the board open for maneuvering, which some competitive players prefer. There is no wrong answer; it comes down to whether you prioritize visual harmony with your roster (go 40mm) or open lanes and a lower price point (go 28mm). The two kits below both ship in 28mm and 40mm, so you can match your board to your collection.

The anchor kit: a full block in one box

For the core of your city block, start with the 28mm Urban Cityscape Terrain bundle (5 Buildings + 4 Vehicles). This set gives you five multi-level storefronts — a donut shop, comic store, burger restaurant, pizza place and more — plus four street vehicles that double as mid-board cover. That is enough to define an entire intersection on its own. Park the vehicles in the open lanes to slow charging melee characters, and use the multi-storey rooftops as deployment perches for ranged or flying models.

The reason a bundle like this works so well for MCP is footprint planning. Instead of guessing how many buildings you need, you get a coordinated set that fills roughly half a 3' x 3' board, leaving room to add scatter and objectives. Because these are physical, unpainted printed terrain kits that ship to you, you assemble and paint them to match your table — there is no downloading or printing on your end. Pick the 40mm heroic variant if you want the storefronts sized to your Atomic Mass models.

Adding density with a second storefront row

One block is rarely enough once you catch the bug. To turn a single intersection into a believable downtown, layer in the Bleecker Street Urban Terrain set (5 Buildings + 19 Scatter). The name is no accident — this is the quintessential Marvel street scene, with five multi-level buildings including Bleecker Groceries, an old ale house and a noodle shop, plus nineteen pieces of scatter terrain. That scatter is the secret weapon for MCP. Mailboxes, dumpsters, newsstands and barricades give you the small, ground-level cover that protects models mid-advance and creates the broken sight lines the game's objective cards reward.

Set the Bleecker Street buildings along one table edge to form a continuous storefront, then run the Urban Cityscape buildings down the opposite side. Fill the center with vehicles and scatter. You now have two parallel rows of cover with a contested middle — a layout that produces tense, swingy games rather than long-range stalemates. Like the cityscape bundle, Bleecker Street is available in both 28mm and 40mm, so you can keep your whole board to a single consistent scale.

Laying out the block for good games

A few practical placement tips once the kits are assembled. First, stagger building heights so flyers and wall-crawlers always have a meaningful elevation choice; a board where everything is the same height flattens the game. Second, keep at least two clear lanes wide enough for base-to-base movement, or melee-focused rosters will never reach combat. Third, place objectives near — but not directly on top of — heavy cover, so that securing them forces a real risk-reward decision. Finally, leave deployment zones slightly open; players should fight toward the dense terrain, not start buried in it.

Painting and finishing

Because these kits arrive unpainted, you get full control over the look. A fast, effective approach for urban terrain is to prime grey, drybrush a lighter concrete tone over the buildings, then pick out doors, signage and vehicles in bold colors before a light brown wash to settle grime into the recesses. Even a single afternoon of basecoating transforms a raw kit into a table that pops under the lights of game night. If you want a deeper walkthrough, our blog has a dedicated 28mm terrain painting guide.

Your first block, ready for play

Two coordinated bundles — the Urban Cityscape Terrain set for your core buildings and vehicles, and the Bleecker Street set for a second storefront row and a generous helping of scatter — give you everything you need to build a proper Marvel Crisis Protocol city block. Match the scale to your miniatures, stagger your heights, protect your movement lanes, and you will have a board that makes every game feel like a page out of the comics.