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There's no such thing as a scale tree. That's not us being cute about semantics, it's the single most useful thing to understand before you buy scenery for a wargaming table. A tree that looks perfect on a 15mm skirmish board will dwarf a 28mm one, and a tree scaled for 28mm heroic figures will look like a shrub next to 10mm epic-scale armies. Getting the relationship between figure scale and terrain scale right is what separates a board that reads properly at a glance from one that looks slightly off without anyone being able to say why.

How scale actually works

Wargaming scales are usually expressed as a figure height in millimetres, measured roughly from foot to eye level rather than the top of the head. A 28mm figure is a stand-in for a person of average height, so everything around it, trees, buildings, walls, needs to be sized against that same human reference point. The smaller the figure scale, the smaller everything else on the table needs to be, including the terrain, or the whole board starts to feel inconsistent.

Matching terrain to figure scale

At 10mm, often used for large-scale historical and epic battles, terrain needs to stay compact. Trees that are too tall or too bushy will swamp the figures and make troop formations hard to read from a normal viewing distance. Smaller, simpler tree forms tend to work best, along with lower-profile hedging and ground cover that doesn't compete visually with the units moving across it.

At 15mm, a popular scale for historical and modern skirmish gaming, there's a bit more room to work with. Trees can carry a touch more detail and height without overwhelming the board, and this is often where hobbyists start introducing genuine variety, mixing tree types and heights to represent different terrain, without losing the sense of scale.

At 28mm, the most common skirmish and heroic scale, terrain can be the most visually rich. Individual trees are large enough to support real detail, and a board can support taller hedging, bigger cork-built hills, and more layered scatter work, because the figures themselves are large enough to hold their own against busier scenery.

Choosing the right materials

Once scale is sorted, material choice does the rest of the work. Trees form the backbone of most boards, and the right type depends as much on the setting as the scale. Static grass adds texture and depth to open ground that flat paint simply cannot achieve, and applying it in a couple of different shades reads far more naturally than a single uniform colour. Scatter material builds up believable foliage and undergrowth around the base of trees and along terrain edges, and again benefits from layering rather than a single pass. Flexible hedging is particularly useful for linear features, hedgerows, field boundaries, anything that needs to follow a specific line across the table, and cork sheet remains one of the simplest ways to build convincing hills and rough ground without specialist modelling skills.

The rule to keep coming back to

If there's one habit worth building, it's holding a figure up against a piece of terrain before committing to it. It takes seconds, and it catches the mismatches that are much harder to fix once a board is finished. Scale first, materials second, and the terrain will do its job, making the game easier to read and the table more satisfying to play on, not just more decorative.

Browse the wargaming terrain range at themodeltreeshop.co.uk