Added the MAS Guard House to my MDF collection. I have to say… I love it!
Price
To me all the MDF-Stuff seems a little overpriced. After all, without any knowledge of the production process, one could think after you figured out how to cut it – i.e. made some kind of template – you can go mass production with relatively cheap material and some wear and tear on a laser. But what do I know of these things… nothing. What I do know though is, that for MDF Buildings in general, this is good value for your money.
Playability
You can detach the roof. You have ladders to get to the roof. You can stack them, but you get an additional floor/roof so you can use them as seperate entities. You have nice spare parts which you can use to create additional barricade-type shapes. You have doors and windows you can push out. I pushed/cut them all out and then put them back in – they don´t fall out that easily. This is great as you can play open/close window/door, which is nice. The only thing I don´t like that much is the way you remove the roof. It gets a little fiddely when you have minis on the roof and within the building as you only have some small handles to grab and remove it.
Durability
The stuff is quite durable. As assembly even works without glue you have a lot of sticking together going on. Sometimes quite an amount of pressure is involved which can lead to breaking things, but normally that won´t happen and is easily fixed with some white glue.
Looks
It looks great! Even without any painting. So I didn´t do any so far. But I´ve seen people getting really good results with the most basic spray-primer… like levitas here.
Extensability
You could combine them with District 5 and District 5L, but I don´t really see the point. It makes accessability of the interiors more complicated and leaving them alone you can cover more space on your table. Maybe this becomes more interesting if you add catwalks and stuff. We´ll see.
Assembly
I´ve seen reviews where people say the cut parts basically fall out – well that´s not what I experienced. There was some serious cutting going on in my case. I broke one of my exacto knives and nearly cut myself in the process. There are many parts to cut out and it can get a little tedious, but it´s still worth it and once you get the hang of it it goes rather fast. The manual is not very detailed but you can figure out assembly quite quickly.
All in all a great product! I´ll post some pics of it asap.
nerdumludens 