Experimental Buildings

For a while now I've been looking at the cheap, paper gift boxes found at craft stores. I've always thought they would make perfect fodder for quick and dirty 15mm terrain. Well I finally went out and bought a few and cobbled them together into the building above. Except for a wrong cut that I patched together for the sake of completeness, I think it worked out pretty well. 

I marked out the doors and windows in Sharpy and then got to work cutting and gluing. Each box comes with a lid and I found that if I flipped the box over and glued the lid to the top of the box it made a nice building with a rooftop patio. The style is slightly Middle Eastern and certainly could be used for any sort of indigenous adobe construction. Stacking a second box on top of the the first, allowed for a second story with a nice reinforcing trim where the stories joined.

Considering that these boxes come in a variety of sizes and shapes it is conceivable that an entire sprawl or vertical adobe structure could be cobbled together with little difficulty. Using a little filler or even some simply strips of paper glued over the joins between the boxes would give them a more solid appearance, but even without this, the effect is still pretty effective. Once painted and shaded it should be less apparent. 

One nice thing about these boxes is how solid they are. they require absolutely no reinforcement or basing and would be easily left in such a fashion that they could be plugged into any sort of scenery. With their bottoms open they can also be used to conceal miniatures for those occasions when you want your hostiles to be less obvious. As much as they do not need it, I do feel that a little creative basing with some scenic effects would bring these into their own, I think.

-Eli