Mice-at-Arms

Just outside the conscious perception of mere humans stand armies of small but vicious mice waging war. Yes, maybe even in you own backyard!

Most of you have likely heard about the great game Mice-at-Arms (MaA) by David Bezio by now. If not, you really should check out our fb group and our webpage for early alerts of these sorts of things. Note: All photos of nicely painted minis and terrain shown here are provided by David, and all partially painted minis and unpainted 3d prints are by me (which surprises no one that knows me).

But this blog post is going to deal with terrain for them. While the terrain is suitable for a wide range of games the unique scale of the mice figures creates an opportunity to have some fun with one new piece in particular. By scale, I don’t mean the figure size. They are around the same size as most 15mm figures so there is a lot of terrain out there already for those. I really mean scale because, although they are anthropomorphic, they are still mouse-size. A lot of the terrain can simply be “re-sized” by the simple name change spelled out in the rules. Instead of having a lake be an obstacle for movement, the mice warriors must skirt around a pond. Or instead of climbing a tall hill to gain an advantage, they utilize a mound as the king and his body guard are doing below.

So hills, rivers, lakes, rough going, and walls even, all translate pretty well but what about woods. In scale, which is around 1:10, trees would be too large to fit a woods in the game table space. But no worries, there is now another woods-like area that our mice heroes can take cover in: the Tall Patch. The tall patch is an area of flowers, weeds, and/or briar patch. Most gamers don’t have this sort of terrain piece in their pile, and it is unlikely to be found for sale in a shop, so it is a good reason to get creative and have some fun. Below are the images from the rulebook, from David’s crafting, and my 3d printed model for inspiration.

I need to do a few more tweaks to my models before I upload them to Thingiverse. Once I do, I’ll update this post with a link to them. There will be one for each of the terrain types listed in the rule including the complete castle. For those not familiar with Thingiverse, the models are all offered for free. Most include share & share alike licenses that allow uses to remix or modify the work and offer it up with the same agreement. It is a great way to help the community grow by lowering the bar of entry so that is what we decided to to here. You can get the rules for free so why shouldn’t you be able to get the 3d models of the needed terrain for free also. Test prints of castle pieces just started this morning so we only have a screen render at the moment.

If you don’t have a 3d printer or have a friend able to help you out, check out your local library or similar organizations. Usually, you only need to pay a modest materials fee to use the equipment. And for those of you that like scratch built terrain, we’ll do a tutorial blog post for that as well (but we have to paint our mouse armies first).

I’ve been squeezing in some pieces of sci-fi 3d terrain test prints as I’ve been running this MaA terrain. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share photos of those with you very soon.