City Fighting in Stalingrad. Building a gaming table for urban assault missions.

Time flies. It’s already two years since the last Polar Bear tournament here in Iceland, where I made a Berlin inspired gaming table for our Late War tournament. This time 17th-18th of January 2026, we will be playing Mid War. Jökull, who is the organiser this year. has come up with a rulespack where we will play both normal games on a standard 120x180cm(4’x6′) table but also play some games using the Urban Assault Missions, that Battlefront released in the the two Mid War books, Iron Cross and Enemy At The Gates. These Urban Assault Missions are played on a 60x90cm(2’x3′) table. Each book has two missions giving us a total of 4 different Urban Assault Missions. Jökull and I decided to split them between us with each of us in charge of making two tables.

Planning.

As you can see in the mission briefings below, the setup is fairly straightforward, with the only real difference to normal missions is that the building has to be divided into rooms that are 10-15cm wide, with some missions having 4 rooms in a building and others 8 rooms. This is substantially bigger than your standard 15mm wargaming buildings.

As I was looking at these missions, it dawned on me that each table is one quarter of a normal gaming table, so there might be a way to make them into a normal gaming table, with the option to split it up. I started drawing up the missions with the placement of the buildings and ended up with a draft I liked, adding in some roads to tie it all together.

I chose to make the The Boulevard and The Factory so in this article I will show how I made those two, hopefully with a follow up piece on the other two parts.

Building the tables.

The Boulevard.

I started with The Boulevard. The main part here was the two apartment blocks. Battlefronts city ruins will fit perfectly for this. They have the right size and also have a good hight so it is possible to get a lot of miniature stands into each room for good gameplay. One of the downsides with living on an island in the north atlantic is, that getting the right battlefront stuff is sometimes prohibitively expensive, so I found some good looking STL files on Thingiverse and got a friend of mine to print them on his Bamboo lab 3d printer.

The apartment blocks was glued together with super glue and given 2 coats of thinned down black primer to make sure all the crevasess was covered. Each block was then dry brushed with the colour of choice with the next layer being lighter and covering less of the surface. I choose to paint one block redish and one brown-/yellow-ish. The first floor, corners and dividers was all painted in a grey colour to break things up and make for something interesting for the eyes. The inside was painted in a beige colour with some black markings added with the airbrush for a burnt out feeling.

With the apartment blocks done, it was time to move on the the board itself. I choose to go with 12mm MDF, it’s relatively light weight and easy to work with, with the downside being it tends to warp if you don’t add a frame, store it right or make sure both sides are getting paint/glue.

Once the MDF was cut to size, I transferred the layout from my planning draft and got the building in place. I added a little sidewalk around each block using some thin(4mm) XSP strips that I gave some texture using a rolling pin from Green Stuff World. The XPS was glued down using some hot glue.

For the streets, I went with the simplest solution using sand. I marked in the streets, put down some masking tape, added a good about of PVA glue and sprinkled some sand and a bit of small rocks on followed by a coat of very thinned down PVA glue sprayed with a mistifier.

The rest of the table was then covered in plaster and rubble added while the plaster is still wet. For rubble I used cork that I had broken into little pieces and some cut to resemble bricks just like some brick shaped XPS and some bits of leftover masonite I had used for basing buildings in a previous project. I also added some broken coffee stirrers to look like wood planks or roof beams. After the plaster was dry(12hour) I covered the entire board with two coats for watered down PVA glue to make sure most things would stay in place.

Everything was now covered with 2 layers of very thinned down brown paint, making sure not to sirt too much in the same place with the brush as the wet paint will reactivate the PVA glue. The reason the paint needs to be thinned down is to make sure it will run into all the crevasses in the rubble making sure there are not any white spots left.

The streest was then drybrushed with two layers of gray paint, startingwith a dark colour going to a lighter on the second pass. The ground part was drybrushed with some lighter browns ending with the entire board being drybrushed with some light sand colour to resimble dust. the rubble parts was drybrushed using a palette of browns, reds and beige adding some black washes where i thought I went too light.

After the paint was dry, I covered the ground in a layer of PVA glue and sprinkled two different colours of static grass from woodland scenics. Harvest gold and Medium green.

As the final details I added some streetlights bought from Teemu and based on some coins and some telephone/electricity poles again added to coins to make them easy to move aside when playing, but still adding something to the over all look. I also added a couple of 3d printed cars that I quickly painted up.

The Factory

The second table for the mission The Factory was made using the same approach and techniques as described above with the main differences being adding a train and a different building type.

Getting a building that fit the size of the Factory in the mission, proved to be a minor problem. It needed to be between 20-30cm(8″-12″) wide and 40-60cm(16″-24″) long. Nowhere online could i find a building that would be suitable, so I came up with another solution. I cut up a 15mm MDF building we had in the club that we had used for Berlin mega battle years ago and by adding the room dividers in the middle I was able to get the desired size.

I also added a couple of 3d printed parts like the destroyed chimney, machines and outside gas storage. With the increase in width of the building the old roof beams had become to short, so I added a middle section using matches and glue. I also added two rounded blocks of foam to act as the base for two coal mounts and a 3d printed train and track from Donald Law.

Halfway through the painting process I ran out of paint, so had to use another colour as you can see on the inside of the factory.

To make the inside of the Factory look different from the apartment blocks I went with a very thin coat of skyblue and dry brushed with white adding some streaking with thinned down black paint. I also changed the colour on the outside of the factory to red to make it more in line with at colour I used on the rubble. Grey would maybe have been much more historical accurate, but red/brown makes for a much better contrast to the green and yellow grass.

The coal mounts was done by adding plaster to the foam blocks and adding rocks while it was still wet, painting it black once dry. After everything was dry I gave it two coats of matt floor varnish and now its ready to see battle.

I hope you enjoyed the process, happy hobbying.

-Soren-