15mm ‘Potzdammer Platz’ building

At Vapnartak, I bought a 15mm ‘Potzdammer Platz’ building from Commission Figurines. Up to now I have been somewhat underwhelmed by the laser-cut MDF offerings, but this is a great, realistic-looking kit with a lot of detail. One thing I noticed immediately was that the wall sections all have the same edge pattern, so they can be linked to form a street of buildings:

Assembly was easy. The only minor problem was that the wall sections are supposed to fit into a groove in the floor sections, but the groove was too tight for the two long wall sections. This was easily solved by sanding the walls just enough to make them fit. 

Once assembled, the four wall-and-floor sections lock together to form the building:

Here is the assembled building, with two bases of 15mm Peter Pig US Marines for scale:

The ‘jigsaw puzzle’ corners, common to most MDF kits, work in this building's favour, looking at a glance like quoins that are meant to be there. The interlocking edges are more obvious on the sides of the building, which is meant to be some kind of render over bricks, but they are easily camouflaged with some wood-filler:

All in all, I was pretty impressed with it. I think I’ll be painting it as a Stalingrad building for use with Rapid Fire!, rather than using it for my Crossfire-based Chechenya project, but it needs nothing more than a few thin washes of colour – it already has some great tones on it because of the MDF material and as a side-effect of the laster cutting. 

It won’t be a selling point for everyone, but a surprise bonus for me was that the burnt MDF smells very much like shrimp powder...