Geek Gaming Scenics Base Ready "Pine Forest Ground Cover" Review

 

Pricepoint

Direct from Geek Gaming Scenics' website, a 250ml tub will set you back £6.99. As mentioned in our last review of a GGS product, that's significantly more product than the tub used by other brands such as Krautcover and Army Painter for their own "base ready" mixtures, for a slightly lower price.

What do you get?

 

This mixture is composed of a combination of long and short shards of dark wood fibres, a very fine grit, and a large amount of what appears to be GGS' Autumn Static Grass mixture. It's designed to evoke the ground cover one finds in a dense conifer forest. For those of you who've not walked around in one yourself, forests mostly or entirely of Pine trees can be very dark and densely-packed, depending on where you live, and there's not a lot of other plant life when compared to some other deciduous forests. The canopy of tree leaves is very thick, and the undergrowth is carpeted in a layer of dead pine needles. To my eye, I'd say the mix looks more like a European Pine forest undergrowth than the lighter shade you'd get around Canary Island pines or Iberian & Mediterranean Pines, where the trees often grow further apart, though you might be able to get that effect if you mixed in other, lighter basing materials.

So What Do I Think?

I won't bury the lede, this is my second time buying this product, as I've based a good number of the miniatures in my existing collection with this mix. I originally got it for models I use in Silver Bayonet, a Gothic Horror game, and this has worked quite well for darker models like werewolves, zombies and figures in more drab uniforms. The wood fibres in the mix help the material form thicker, natural bulges in the undergrowth in places when desired, while still being able to lay flat when applied in a thinner layer, and the occasional fibre that sticks up slightly on the base does look very much like natural roots and twigs one would find in this environment.

These French investigators are 28mm, and you can see that the colour of the blend works well with the darker greys and browns, while providing a good neutral for the brighter reds and whites to stand out against. The grit and some of the smallest chips of wood do sometimes interact weirdly with the static grass, and can have a tendency to stand on top of the blades of grass in an unnatural way. These are at least easy to pick off the base while drying or dislodge once dried, if you find any that look out of place.

The mix also seems to react well to different glues - the models pictured throughout the article were based using white and clear PVA, Kraut Tac and in one case Superglue, and there is no noticeable difference.

I think if I was using this for terrain, I'd want to get some of the static grass that seems to be in this mixture, as varying the ratios of basing mix to pure grass will help vary up the textures of undergrowth a great deal. 

QA

This second time buying the product I found something that hadn't been in the first pack - tiny chips of a white stonelike substance, and in one case a little piece of some kind of terracotta.

 

At first I thought this was cross-contamination, from something else being packed at the same time, but on closer inspection of the rest of the mixture it seems not. These are, in fact, larger shards of the tiny particles that make up the "dirt" in the main mixture, but not ground down to the same consistency. Whether this is some particles escaping the grinder or bits that would have been filtered out accidentally getting back in, it's an incredibly small amount compared to the rest of the pack; maybe one fragment in a teaspoonful. But, unfortunately, if you don't catch them with the naked eye as you're applying the base mixture, these larger particles can stand out on your finished base.

This miniature is thankfully at a large enough scale to where you can pass it off as a pebble underfoot, but this would be more noticeable at scales where this would be the size of a large rock or small boulder in an otherwise forest undergrowth. 

Does it Sieve?

Sieving this product leaves you with two excellent mixes; the finer of the two is more like what you'd get on a pathway, either natural or cultivated, though the woods and the thicker mix actually manages to capture more of the grass than usual, and makes for a much denser undergrowth that you may prefer for your deeper woodlands.

While I've not sieved the mix I used on the small scale miniatures in the next section, I think that's where the finer version would shine, and if they did a "small scale" version of this mix like they do with some of their others, that's what I'd expect to see. 

Does it Scale?

These 10mm scale miniatures turned up in my goodie-bag at Salute 2026 - peering over people's shoulders as I stood in line, I noticed some folks had gotten a different faction that came with 2 sprues instead of one, but mustn't grumble. In any case, you'll see that the infantry do get quite shin-deep in the mix, even on their little puddle bases, but the monsters and artillery manage to stay on top of the leaf litter.

And, making their debut on this website, an actual larger scale model like the ones I keep talking about in previous reviews, this time at 54mm scale:

This may be the first mix where it seems to shine even more at the larger scale - while it's a little flat on its own, the grass is very natural looking as well-trodden dirt and the fibres look more like loose twigs than the roots it's designed to emulate. I did throw in a Gamers Grass "XL" tuft behind the mini to see how big a tuft you'd need for this size of mini (I'm less experienced at this scale than at 28 or 6-12mm) and even though it's a "Jungle" tuft the shade seems to match. 

Final Score - 4/5 - Greener Pastures

 

This was very nearly a 5. The only things that hold this back, for me, is that it's a little plain as a "Base Ready" mixture; while that makes it a good canvas for adding further details such as tufts and clumps, it can look a little unremarkable without them. While the QA issue with the larger particles this time around is a shame, I'm not necessarily going to ding it for that, as that may have been a one-off and you can work around it. You may even find the larger fragments desirable if you're mixing this with other materials; the flake of terracotta less so.

On the whole, though, I do recommend this mix if you are looking for that darker, moodier tone for your project, whether that be the forest moon of Endor, the bases of some Germanic tribesmen waiting to ambush Varus' Legions, or just a dark undergrowth for your gaming table.