Fully Grounded: #1 Tall Grass (Patreon)

Base terrain from Emporium Miniatures at:  https://www.etsy.com/listing/771129011/tall-grass-terrain-set-for-kingdom-death 

Grass by fen's shredding of a nice large paintbrush. Tutorial on request.

• Number: 2 sets of 2 (Total: 4)
• Size: 2x2
• Passive: Yes
• Activate: Yes
• Obstacle: No
• Classification: Defensive

We shall start with the first piece of terrain that all players should encounter, because it is always placed when hunting the White Lion and Gorm. Tall Grass. This terrain has one of the strongest benefits for survivors because of its dual protective traits and the way that it is deployed in pairs.

In a typical fight where there is tall grass, most of the action will revolve around one of the two patches, with the tank survivor making use of the passive +2 evasion and combining it with other sources of evasion (Rawhide, SotF, Monster Grease) to devastate the monster's ability to hit. It's one of the reasons why the White Lion is weak when compared to other monsters in the game. It always comes with a potential -2 accuracy debuff on all its attack profiles. 

Typically the survivors will perform a dance around this terrain, because the White Lion full moves forward and grabs, you do not want to have it able to run over all four tiles at the same time and a lot of the tactical play involves getting the White Lion to be stood next to a corner as much as possible.

With the Gorm, because of the nature of that monster and the fixed positions of the tall grass, it is a less important and useful part of the showdown. Because the Gorm can retch as a reaction, which ignores armor, it is rare that the tank will stand directly in front of the monster for the entire survivor turn. A different dance is employed, where the tank moves from the front to the side and then sometimes (rarely) back after all the survivors have attacked. Because Retch moves the Gorm backwards, and it has a less predictable AI when compared to the White Lion's "I pounce what's in front of me" programming, you just can't constantly hold the Gorm around the tall grass for the evasion bonus.

This is where the second ability is worth mentioning, the activated ability of the Tall Grass is used a lot less by players, but it is an exceptional and strong one. Especially for the type of survivor known as "Pure Support" who sacrifice offense in exchange for a full suit of monster control and healing/defensive abilities. They can step into the grass, activate it, and enjoy not being  a threat for the entire showdown. A monster with only 3 viable targets is significantly easier than one with 4, especially when the 4th "target" is manipulating the monster's behavior via AI/HL deck. We'll come back to this idea of 'hiding' a survivor with obstacle terrain in the future.

You can also use the hide function to get a single survivor out of a bad break by having them move to it and duck down, this function allows for refocusing a monster who has pointed in the wrong direction because of a reaction or similar. If you're caught out of position, can't afford to be attacked and the group needs time to reset. Never forget that you can move over to tall grass and opt out of being a threat (especially when talking about the White Lion, who will almost always pick threats over other survivors).

In most other showdowns, it is chance that brings the tall grass to the battlefield, and it tends to be very strong where monsters do not have ways of automatically flushing survivors out of the terrain and/or are very static in their movement (i.e. not like the Screaming Antelope). You'll also notice that some of the very strongest monsters ensure that you can't ever draw Tall Grass because they have no random terrain draws. 

Notes on 3D Terrain version:

Building the terrain piece for Tall Grass is always a bit of a challenge, because the monsters and survivors can stand in it you end up having to do one of the following:

A) Construct a large "hole" of missing grass in the middle where the survivors or the monster can stand. It looks great when they are in there, but not so good when they are out and it cannot hold the 3x3 or 4x4 monsters. When the 3x3 or larger monsters stand on it, you have to substitue in the original flat terrain.

B) Have short grass instead, which is more functional but not as good looking.

C) Make multiple different versions of each, one with full grass everywhere, one with spaces for survivors/2x2 monster, one with just 2 sides covered and the other two sides flat and one with a single side covered. This allows for all monsters to stand on the grass in various ways, but it is a lot of work and you have to swap out the grass a great deal.

I've chosen to go for A), but if I had 2-3 more spare Tall Grass bases I would have gone with C and created an "L shape" and an "I Shape" tile to cover the situations where larger monsters go for a roll in the grass.

I would highly recommend that you take a look at the google image search for how others have tackled this situation and decide how you intend to do it. There are benefits and issues with each version.