You see many of us rarely have to think about it, I'm sure a lot of you will turn up to your local gaming store or club to play your 1 or 2 wargames a week, and be limited to the scenery they have out for display purposes or to hand. In short you're highly likely to be playing on pretty much the same sort of battlefield every time if you do this. However scenery or terrain, and there is a difference as a really good little article by Quirkworthy (Jake Thornton) points out, is vitally important to the playing of any game, if it wasn't why have rules for it and why place it on the board in the first place?
This picture contains 15 Way Watchers, 5 Oniwabans and a goat!!!
Most people just chuck the old scenery down onto the table and have done with it. There might be some discussion about the rotation of a building or the precise placement of some woods, but mostly people don't care and just want to put their toy soldiers down and roll some dice. However scenery is a HUGE part of any game you'll ever play. I remember a discussion I had when I was about 13 with a store manager of a Games Workshop and a friend of mine about Man O War. We'd come to the conclusion you see that High Elves were far too powerful, well they would be, I was the one commanding them and I'm awesome.
Commander Obvious was 'concerned' there was only one bridge
Thing is this manager couldn't understand it, he'd genuinely had no problems with High Elves and neither had a few regulars. We got down to list building and nope that wasn't the issue. Were we playing the rules right? Yes turned out we'd got them spot on. So are we both equally good gamers? Although my huge ego would say no I'm just simply awesome, the fact is in other game systems we were quite evenly matched. Then another staff member said 'how big is the board you're playing on and how much scenery do you use?' well I'd never really considered it until then... but the reality was we were using way too much scenery because my faster and more maneuverable ships were at a huge advantage amongst the myriad of islands we were using. In short the scenery and 'terrain of play' had loaded the games in my favour.
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