The Walking Dead: All Out War is a skirmish game about desperate people creeping through a world that has already fallen apart, and the terrain on your table is what makes that world feel real. A bare board with a few scattered tokens will let you push miniatures around, but it will never capture the tension of a supply run gone wrong. Terrain is the difference between a rules demonstration and a story your group is still talking about a week later. It shapes sight lines, slows movement, hides walkers, and turns an empty square into a place worth fighting over.
It also happens to be one of the most rewarding parts of the hobby. Terrain for The Walking Dead: All Out War can be purchased, 3D printed, scavenged from a toy bin, or built from foam offcuts in a single afternoon. Because the setting is modern and mundane rather than fantasy, almost anything you already own can be repurposed: a broken fence, a burnt-out car, a chunk of strip mall wall. What follows is a practical look at what actually matters on the table, where to find scenery, and how to build boards that play as well as they look.
Why Terrain Changes How All Out War Plays
In most miniature games, terrain is scenery first and a rules element second. In All Out War, that relationship flips. Buildings, vehicles, and fences block line of sight, provide cover, and restrict where survivors and walkers can physically move. A well-placed car wreck can protect a shooter for two turns and then become a death trap when the horde swarms around it. Because the game rewards careful positioning and punishes careless noise, the shape of the board is constantly making decisions for the players, whether they realize it or not.
Terrain also controls the pace of a scenario. Open ground means fast, bloody turns where ranged warbands dominate and walkers arrive in straight lines. Dense, cluttered boards slow everything down, force close-range fights, and make every corner a potential ambush. The sweet spot for most games sits somewhere in the middle, with clear firing lanes cut through clusters of cover, so that movement, shooting, and hiding all remain viable options instead of one tactic steamrolling the rest.
| Terrain Type | Main Tabletop Effect |
|---|---|
| Buildings and walls | Block line of sight, control movement routes, create interior firefights |
| Cars and barricades | Provide cover, create chokepoints, excellent objective markers |
| Woods and hedges | Obscure visibility, slow movement, hide approaching walkers |
| Fences and gates | Funnel movement, force decisions about climbing or going around |
| Scatter and debris | Adds theme, marks dangerous ground, breaks up empty spaces |
Line of Sight, Cover, and Concealment
The most immediate job of any piece of scenery is to break up sight lines. A ruined storefront or a stack of abandoned pallets gives survivors something to duck behind, which directly affects how safe they are when the shooting starts. Walls that fully block visibility create blind spots on the board, and those blind spots are where the game gets interesting, because nobody can safely ignore them. When a survivor disappears behind a building, the other player has to guess whether they are repositioning, flanking, or simply hiding from the walkers drifting toward the noise.
The practical rule of thumb is to give every part of the board at least one piece of cover within a normal move, but never so much that firefights become pointless. If a shooter cannot draw a line to anything, the game turns into a slow crawl where nothing happens. Mix full blockers with low walls, vehicles, and partial cover so players always have a reason to advance rather than sit still. That balance is what keeps a table feeling dangerous instead of merely crowded.
Walker Movement, Chokepoints, and Noise
Walkers do not care about tactics. They drift toward the living, which means terrain effectively becomes a set of pipes and channels for the horde. Alleyways between buildings, gaps in fences, and the open spaces between parked cars all steer walkers in predictable directions, and smart players learn to use that flow to their advantage. A survivor who fires a weapon in a quiet street is not just attacking; they are ringing a dinner bell, and the board layout determines how quickly that noise comes back to haunt them.
This is where chokepoints earn their place. A narrow gate or a collapsed wall can slow a group of walkers to a trickle, buying a warband the turns it needs to grab supplies and escape. The flip side is that the same chokepoint can trap survivors who get cut off, forcing them to fight their way out with no room to maneuver. Building one or two deliberate pinch points into a board creates moments where players have to weigh speed against safety, which is exactly the kind of decision the game is built around.
Where to Find Terrain for The Walking Dead: All Out War
One of the best things about this setting is how accessible the scenery is. You are not hunting for elven ruins or alien monoliths; you need convenience stores, suburban houses, chain-link fences, and dead cars. That means the market is enormous, ranging from purpose-built kits designed for wargaming to cheap junk that looks perfect once it has been primed and drybrushed. The trick is knowing which sources give you the most table-ready pieces for your money and your time.
Scale matters more than most beginners expect. All Out War uses roughly 28 to 32mm miniatures, so doors, cars, and fences need to look believable next to a human figure. A toy car that is technically the right length but twice as tall as a survivor will break the illusion instantly. Before buying or building anything, place a miniature beside it and check the proportions, especially for doorways and vehicle roofs, since these are the pieces players interact with most often.
Purpose-Built Kits, MDF, and Resin Scenery
Dedicated wargaming scenery is the fastest route to a table that looks intentional. MDF kits from companies like Sarissa Precision and TTCombat cover modern buildings, shops, and urban ruins at a fair price, and they assemble quickly with wood glue. Resin pieces, including ruins and vehicles released alongside various Walking Dead miniature ranges, tend to carry crisper detail but cost more per piece and weigh considerably more when you transport them.
The advantage of these kits is consistency. A set of buildings from the same range shares a visual language, so a board made from them reads as one place rather than a random assortment of props. If you are building a specific location from the comics, such as a farmhouse, a prison block, or a fortified suburb, kits also save you from reinventing architectural details. Buy two or three core buildings and fill the rest of the board with scatter, and you will have a table that looks far more expensive than it actually was.
Repurposed Toys, Railroad Scatter, and Cheap Wins
Model railway suppliers are a goldmine for this game. Plastic hedging, streetlights, retaining walls, and station platforms all scale convincingly with 28mm figures, and hobby shops often sell them individually rather than in costly sets. Toy aisles add more: plastic fences, dollar-store garden pieces, and cheap vehicle models can be repainted into convincing wrecks within an evening. Aquarium plants, sold in bulk for a few dollars, make excellent overgrowth when trimmed and based.
Cardboard and paper scenery is another underrated option. Printed terrain sets designed for zombie and modern settings fold flat, store easily, and can fill an entire board for the price of a single resin building. They will not survive years of heavy use the way MDF does, but for players who want variety without a full workshop, they are an efficient way to keep the tabletop from looking identical every session. Combine them with a few solid pieces and the lightweight material disappears into the overall scene.
3D Printing Post-Apocalyptic Terrain
If you have access to a resin or filament printer, All Out War is one of the best-supported settings in the hobby. Independent designers produce entire libraries of ruined houses, gas stations, road sections, barricades, and abandoned vehicles specifically for zombie apocalypse games. Files can be printed on demand, which means you can build a board piece by piece to suit the scenarios you actually play rather than buying a box and hoping it fits.
Printing does come with caveats. Large buildings eat a lot of filament and time, and layer lines show badly on flat surfaces unless you sand, fill, or use a textured paint approach. Resin printers handle small scatter and vehicle details beautifully but struggle with anything bigger than a modest ruin. A sensible strategy is to print scatter, barricades, and vehicles while buying the big buildings as MDF kits, which gives you detail where it matters and volume where it is cheap.
Building and Painting Terrain That Fits the Comics
The visual identity of The Walking Dead is muted, dusty, and worn. This is not a bright post-apocalyptic wasteland full of neon and chrome; it is the American South after a very bad year, with peeling paint, cracked asphalt, and vines crawling over everything humanity left behind. Matching that palette does more for your table than any amount of detail work. A limited color scheme of greys, browns, faded greens, and rust will unify pieces from completely different manufacturers.
It also helps to think about the story each piece tells. A barricade made of overturned furniture implies survivors tried to hold a position and failed. A car with its doors open and belongings scattered around suggests a hasty evacuation. Small narrative touches like these cost almost nothing, but they pull players into the scene and give them something to react to when they move their warband across the board. Terrain that hints at a story is far more memorable than terrain that is merely tidy.
Construction Basics and Materials
Foam board, XPS insulation foam, and plasticard will cover the vast majority of scratch-built projects. XPS foam can be carved into brickwork and cracked concrete with a pencil and a hobby knife, then sealed with a coat of Mod Podge or slightly watered-down PVA glue mixed with paint before priming. Textured spray paint, sold for walls and furniture, is a quick way to add grit to large flat surfaces without any sculpting at all.
Structural reinforcement is worth the extra effort. Anything players will lean on, pick up, or place miniatures on should have a solid base, ideally a piece of MDF or hardboard cut slightly larger than the footprint. Chamfer or sand the base edges, texture them with sand and gravel, and paint them to match the board so the piece does not appear to float. Doors that actually open and removable roofs on buildings dramatically improve playability, particularly in scenarios involving interiors.
Painting Concrete, Rust, and Overgrowth
Concrete is easier than it looks. Prime grey, drybrush a lighter grey, then apply a brown or black wash into the recesses to pull out texture. For rust, base coat a dark brown, stipple orange and ochre over it with a sponge, then wash the whole area to tie the colors together. Because these techniques rely on layering rather than precision, they are forgiving for beginners and quick to apply across large batches of terrain.
Overgrowth is the finishing touch that sells the apocalypse. Static grass tufts, fine flock, and aquarium moss applied in patches around foundations, up walls, and along road edges make a structure look abandoned rather than freshly built. Keep it uneven and clustered; nature reclaims in irregular patterns, not tidy lines. A few bright green tufts against a grey ruin provide exactly the visual contrast that makes a board read clearly from across the table.
Designing Boards and Scenarios That Play Well
A beautiful board that plays badly will sit on the shelf. Before you commit to a permanent layout, play a few games on your terrain and pay attention to which areas see action and which get ignored. Empty corners, impassable buildings, and long open avenues are common problems that show up immediately once miniatures start moving. Treat your board as a set of tactical options rather than a diorama, and it will earn its place in every game night.
Scenario design and terrain go hand in hand. A rescue mission needs interiors and narrow approaches, while a supply run works best with spread-out objectives that force players to split their attention. If your scenarios always involve reaching a specific building, that building becomes the centerpiece of the board and everything else is support. Rotating objectives across different terrain features keeps games fresh without needing new scenery at all.
Balancing Density for 2x2 and 3x3 Tables
Smaller boards demand restraint. On a 2x2 foot play area, four or five significant pieces of terrain is usually plenty, with scatter filling the gaps. Overloading a small table creates a maze where nothing can shoot and walkers pile up in dead ends, which sounds thematic but plays poorly. Aim for two or three pieces of cover per quarter of the board, leaving at least one clear route across the table.
Larger 3x3 boards can handle much more. Six to ten major pieces, plus vehicles and scatter, gives players meaningful choices about routes and positions. The key is to vary the density rather than spreading scenery evenly. A dense cluster of buildings on one side and a more open, exposed area on the other creates natural risk and reward, since the safer route is slower and the faster route is far more dangerous.
Scenario Layouts and Objective Placement
Good objective placement forces movement. If every objective sits in cover, players will simply camp, so mix in one or two exposed markers that require a survivor to step into the open. Placing supplies inside a building whose doors and windows limit visibility is another easy way to generate tension, especially when walkers are already drifting toward the noise your warband made getting there.
Escape routes deserve deliberate thought. Scenarios where survivors must cross the whole board work best when there are at least two viable paths, each with different trade-offs in speed, cover, and exposure to walker traffic. Test layouts by walking through them yourself with a tape measure before playing; if one route is obviously superior in every respect, adjust a fence or add a vehicle until the choice becomes genuinely difficult.
Terrain is the part of this hobby that keeps paying you back. Every new ruin, fence line, or abandoned car adds possibilities to your games, and because the setting is so ordinary, you can build most of it from things you would otherwise throw away. Start with a handful of versatile pieces, play a few scenarios, and then let the gaps in your board tell you what to build next. The next time a survivor sprints across open ground with the horde closing in behind them, you will understand exactly why the tabletop itself is the most important character in the game.