Colour-Coding Your City by District: Palettes That Unify Urban, Industrial & Cyberpunk Terrain

Most tables start the same way: one bundle, painted in one sitting, looking great on its own. Then a second kit arrives, maybe a warehouse block or a neon cyberpunk strip, and suddenly the board looks like three different hobbyists built it. Our earlier guide on basing and colour unity covered the fundamentals of making mixed kits match. This article goes a step further for intermediate and advanced painters: instead of forcing every building into one palette, you deliberately split your city into districts, give each its own colour identity, and then tie them together with a handful of shared tones. The result is a board that feels varied and coherent, like a real city seen from above.

Why districts beat a single palette

Real cities are not one colour. Downtown is glass, brick and concrete; the docks are rust, faded paint and oil; the entertainment strip is saturated signage against dark facades. When every building on your table gets the same grey-and-brown treatment, the board becomes readable but flat. When every building gets a unique scheme, it becomes noisy. District colour-coding sits in the middle: each zone reads as a place, and players can talk about the board in plain terms ("I'm pushing into the industrial yard") which is surprisingly useful in objective-driven skirmish games like Marvel Crisis Protocol, Infinity, Kill Team or Stargrave.

Step 1: Map your districts before you prime

Lay every unpainted kit you own on the table in its rough final position. Most 3x3 or 4x4 boards support three districts comfortably; a 22x30 Kill Team board supports two at most. A layout that works well at 28mm looks like this:

Civic core: mid-rise offices, storefronts and street vehicles. The 28mm Urban Cityscape Terrain bundle (5 buildings + 4 vehicles) is ideal as a centrepiece because its buildings share a consistent architectural language you can paint as a block.

Industrial edge: warehouses, loading doors and yard clutter along one table edge. The Urban Warehouse District's four modular industrial buildings give you a natural wall of large footprints that doubles as long-range cover.

Neon quarter: the saturated, high-contrast zone. The Cyberpunk City Terrain Bundle brings buildings, vehicles and scatter in one kit, so the whole quarter can be painted in a single batch.

Take a quick phone photo of this layout. You will refer back to it when choosing where transitions happen.

Step 2: Choose a shared foundation

The trick that makes districts feel like one city is that they all sit on the same ground. Pick three tones and use them on every kit, regardless of district:

Street tone: a mid-dark neutral grey for asphalt and pavement. Keep it slightly warm or slightly cool, but consistent.
Grime tone: one brown-black wash or oil wash used in recesses and at the base of every wall.
Dust tone: a pale sandy grey drybrushed low on every building and vehicle, as if the whole city shares the same road dust.

Roads are the strongest unifier you have. A continuous street network running between districts, such as the tiles in the Urban Highway & City Streets Bundle, painted in your single street tone, will do more for cohesion than any amount of matching wall colours. The elevated highway section also works as a physical border between districts, which makes transitions feel intentional.

Step 3: Give each district a dominant and an accent

Within each district, limit yourself to one dominant colour family and one accent. Everything else is shared foundation tones.

Civic core: dominant warm brick or buff stone, accent in a muted civic colour like dark green awnings or navy trim. Keep saturation moderate so miniatures pop against it.

Industrial edge: dominant faded corrugated tones (oxidised teal, washed-out yellow or dull red-brown), accent in hazard yellow and black. Rust and oil staining come from your shared grime tone, pushed heavier here than anywhere else.

Neon quarter: dominant near-black facades in cool grey or deep blue, accent in two neon hues at most, typically magenta and cyan. The dark base is what makes the neon glow; resist painting walls bright.

A useful rule: the accent should cover no more than about 10% of any building's visible surface. That restraint is what stops a district from looking like a toy set.

Step 4: Build transitions, not borders

Where two districts meet, blend them with small cross-over details. This is where experienced painters separate a good board from a great one.

Carry the industrial hazard stripe onto one or two bollards in the civic core. Let a single neon sign or holo-ad from the cyberpunk quarter appear on the nearest civic storefront. Put an industrial pallet stack or dumpster at the mouth of the neon alley. Each of these is a tiny bridge that tells the eye these zones belong to the same place.

Scatter is your best tool here because it moves. Paint a few crates, barriers and vehicles in neutral foundation tones only so they can live in any district. Then paint a smaller set with district accents. On game night, sprinkle the accented pieces near their home district and the neutral pieces at the borders.

Step 5: Batch-paint by district

Once your plan is set, work district by district rather than building by building. Because these are physical, unpainted printed kits, you can prime an entire district at once, basecoat it in one session, then wash and drybrush the whole group together. Batch painting keeps colours consistent (you mix each paint once) and dramatically cuts total painting time.

A practical order that works:

1. Prime all kits in the same primer colour, usually grey or black.
2. Basecoat each district's dominant colour.
3. Paint all streets and ground elements across the whole board in the shared street tone.
4. Apply the shared grime wash to every district in one pass.
5. Add accents district by district.
6. Finish with the shared dust drybrush across the whole table, the final unifying step.

Step 6: Test under game-night lighting

Before varnishing, set the board up under the light you actually play under. Take a photo from player height and one from overhead. If one district dominates the photo, knock its accent back with a thin glaze of the dust tone. If a district disappears, add a slightly brighter edge highlight to its dominant colour. Small corrections at this stage are much easier than repainting later.

Expanding without breaking the plan

The best part of a district system is that growth becomes easy. A new kit either joins an existing district, in which case you already have the paints and recipe written down, or it becomes a new district that only needs one new dominant and accent. Keep a simple note card per district listing its exact paints. Six months from now, when another bundle arrives, you will be glad you did.

Whether you are building a superhero city block, a neon megacity or a gritty dockside warzone, district colour-coding turns a collection of kits into a city with character. Start with the ground, keep accents disciplined, and let the transitions do the storytelling.