Stargrave & Frostgrave: Terrain for Crew-Based Skirmish

Stargrave and Frostgrave share a simple secret: the terrain is the game. Joseph McCullough's crew-based skirmish rules assume a table so cluttered that no model can see more than a dozen inches in any direction. Loot tokens hide behind crates, crews scramble up ruined walls, and half the tactical decisions come down to what's blocking line of sight. If your table is a green mat with three hills on it, you're not really playing the same game.

The good news is that building a proper crew-skirmish table is easier than it looks — especially with physical, ready-to-assemble terrain kits. Here's how we approach it.

Why Crew-Based Skirmish Games Demand Dense Terrain

In a mass-battle game, terrain is seasoning. In Stargrave and Frostgrave, it's the main course. Both games are built around small crews of eight to ten models competing to grab loot and escape, and the rules punish open ground hard. A crew caught in the open eats shooting attacks and spells with nowhere to hide.

McCullough's own guidance is that you almost cannot have too much terrain. A standard 3x3 foot table should have a significant piece of terrain — a building, a wreck, a rock formation — roughly every six inches. That density does three things: it shortens firing lanes so combat crews can close the distance, it creates multiple viable routes to every loot token, and it makes climbing, jumping, and falling rules actually matter.

Building a Stargrave Table: Lost Colonies and Ruined Ports

Stargrave's setting — a galaxy shattered by war, full of derelict stations and half-abandoned colony worlds — is a gift for terrain builders. You want a table that reads as lived-in but broken: hab blocks, industrial structures, alleys, and scatter everywhere.

A dense multi-building kit is the fastest way there. Our 28mm UnderNidus Sci-Fi Terrain Bundle packs ten grimdark buildings into a single box, which is enough to fill a 3x3 Stargrave table on its own. The gothic-industrial look sells the “ravaged frontier” feel perfectly, and because the kits arrive unpainted, you can weather them as heavily as your setting demands. Ten distinct structures also means every game plays differently — rearrange the blocks and you have a new colony.

If your crews lean more toward smugglers and port-city underworld than gothic ruin, mix in street-level pieces. The Cyberpunk Essentials Bundle adds 28mm city buildings and vehicles, and vehicles are quietly one of the best Stargrave terrain investments you can make. A parked hauler or ground car is instant hard cover, a natural objective marker, and exactly the kind of thing a loot token wants to hide behind.

Making Sci-Fi Kits Work for Frostgrave

Here's a trick veteran players know: terrain crosses over more than you'd think. Frostgrave's frozen city of Felstad needs ruins, and a ruin is mostly about silhouette and paint. Take the same industrial structures, prime them in cold greys, drybrush up through bone white, and snow-flock the flat surfaces — suddenly your sci-fi sprawl reads as an ancient city locked in ice. The UnderNidus buildings' heavy buttresses and gothic detailing are especially forgiving here; painted in frost tones they pass for magical ruins without a second glance.

If you play both games, this dual-use approach means one collection of physical kits covers two systems. That's a better return than buying a separate table's worth of terrain for each.

Assembly and Painting: A Practical Order of Operations

Because these are physical printed kits you assemble yourself, a little planning saves a lot of time:

Dry-fit first. Test every join before glue. Decide which rooftops and floors you want removable — in crew games, models fight inside and on top of buildings constantly, so access matters.

Prime dark, drybrush up. A dark grey or black prime, a heavy mid-grey drybrush, and a light top drybrush gets a whole table to “good from four feet” in a weekend. Save detail work for doors, signage, and one or two hero pieces.

Unify with a wash and a base tone. Kits from different sets look like one city when they share a common grime wash and matching base colour. This is how you blend cyberpunk streets with underhive blocks seamlessly.

Scatter, Loot, and the Last Ten Percent

Big buildings set the skeleton of the table; scatter terrain is the connective tissue that makes crew games sing. Crates, barrels, terminals, barricades, and vehicles fill firing lanes and give every loot token a plausible home. When you place loot, tuck it into contested spots — behind a vehicle, inside a doorway, on a rooftop — so both crews have to commit and manoeuvre rather than snipe from deployment.

One last table-setup habit worth stealing: after you've placed everything, crouch down to model's-eye view. If you can see clear across the table at miniature height, add more terrain. Your games will be tighter, your combat crews will finally earn their pay, and Stargrave and Frostgrave will play the way they were written to.

Every kit ships from our shop as unpainted physical terrain, printed to order — ready for you to assemble, paint, and fight over. Browse the bundles above and get your crew off the open ground.