Review of Battle Systems: Roads & Rivers (updated with sizes and comparisons)

With nearly all the terrain I need to start doing solo play FOGN and Rangers of Shadowdeep, it's time to start some reviews of the terrain I have acquired. First is Battle Systems: Roads & Rivers

Battlesystems Bridge, and Road & Rivers. The blue plastic is a river mat from a Kickstarter I will review in future.

Battle Systems: Roads & Rivers

I ordered from their website and it arrived within a few days(!), so local distribution in Australia is very fast

A small box.

4 Cardboard plates come in the box. One one side you have stone roads, along with a broken cart and some signs.

And the other it flips over to rivers. The scatter terrain on this side is grassy rather than stony.

Thew cardstock is thick, but not hugely strong. It does bend and you can't really flock or glue items onto one side without it causing issues on the other. If I get more in the future, I could see just gluing flock and some of the scatter terrain onto one side only and using that permanently. 

The terrain does pop out very easily and is fun to do. I didn't damage any doing so, and never needed a hobby knife or other equipment to do so.

Enough road to cross a 4 foot wargame table.

Being light cardboard, it is easy to bump it out of enlightenment, but very easy to put back.

You could get 6 feet, though with some bends.

The box is enough for one river or road to cross a battlefield, but you would need more for a city of roads for example - ideally 6 boxes for a city grid or canal city.  A straight road or river crossing the battlefield would take 2-3 boxes.

Compared to the blue river mat, it does stand out as more drawn.

For the price though, it's quite good. MUCH cheaper than rubber rivers I got for FOGN, and vastly better than I could do myself

A dock, broken cart, signs, milestones and scatter terrain.

The dock dosn't actually really FIT on the river, but would be fine to double as a small walk bridge. The signs and scatter give some colour. I do think it looks quite good on the blue river mat. I should glue the cartwheel tom the cart as there's not much holding it on (though it then works fine on the ground!)

Haven, that way. 

N0dn0l 10 Miles. I like the sparkling water effect.

Note the milestone markers have both a stony and grassy side, which is a nice touch. I should probably glue the milestones to their plate.

For the price and low effort to build/pop it out, I quite like this road and river system. If/when I can get more, I'd probably want 6 sets in total, to do a city grid I could put some detail on (like gluing the scatter terrain to it for a more 3D effect and 2 packs on the river side I could glue some small pebbles, flock and small bushes on.

UPDATE 

A comment on TPM pointed out I neglected to post the size of the road and rivers.

Lengh ways down the table

About 67 inches. Width is 3 inches.

4 Straight pieces, 1 junction, one slight curve, 2 90 degree curves, 2 end pieces and 1 square piece. Bridge not included,

Note one of the straight pieces has a ford on it. 

Comparison to rubber and mat river

And now a comparison to some rubber river I got for FOGN Miniature Worldmaker and the water mat from a one off Kickstarter.

This version is more than enough for a 6 foot table and more left over. Comes with one bridge and ford.

The rubber river is just a stream at 28mm, but is really used fore 18mm FOGN. It's also 5 times more expensive! I got an extra bridge separate from the rubber river.

The river mat does not reach 6 feet, so can only go across the width of the table by itself.  The grass sides to it came in the same kickstarter

The grass sides vary in size, and I could put something under them to make some hills and rises.

There's enough blue mat to do a beach landing on a 4 foot table. I could have got a brown one but I really like how it reflects the light in photos. 

A review of the the Bridge can be found in my next post.

Update #2- The Grumpy Gnome has also done a review of it. He suggested using some wash to remove the glare from the roads, a very good idea! I will have to try that. I could use some blue wash on the river side too.