Miniature Wargaming on a Budget

Miniature wargaming may have the hardest time staying relevent in the 21st century. While pen and paper role-playing games are outdone at the point hack and slash styled games by their computer counterparts (I do love me some Diablo), the options of the players are still only limited by imagination. Even if they are in nature a social activity, play-by-post or Google wave games prove that the activity can still thrive in a new format. Not so with miniature wargaming. The hobby, is bulky, expensive, and requires patience that the conveinences of electronic gaming have drained away from even the nerdiest people. It doesn't help that Games Workshop, the face of the hobby, has helped to turn more folks out of it with prices rises way ahead of the inflation rate. Why spend your money on a single Land Raider when I could have days worth of easy entertainment from a copy of Red Dead Redemption or Fallout 3 for the same price? What do miniatures have left to run with?

The spectacle of it all, of course. There is little cooler than seeing two completely painted up armies numbering in the hundreds, each model painted with love, fighting it out over on a battlefield of barricades and ruined buildings. At its best, miniature wargaming is an exciting museum diorama that you get to command and control in a game of wits and tactics against a like-minded individual.

With that in mind, we need to look at the cost of these games, and what one would get out of them. A complete Warhammer 40,000 army costs about 600 dollars, give or take 100 depending on how much of a horde army you're playing. What about Flames of War, which is at this time the premier WWII game? About $300. For the price of the former, I could get a Playstation 3 or a budget gaming PC, and the latter, perhaps a Nintendo Wii. Warmachine is around $200 for a playable force, which is probably the most I could imagine the average person being willing to spend without buying the aforementioned Playstation. However, I think we can go even cheaper than that. Here's the plan. For our purposes, let's say we want to play out WW2.

#1 Go with 15mm, individually based, platoon to company scale
Big enough to be visible to the human eye and small enough to be bought cheaply, 15mm scale is perfect for our goal. based on pennies or smaller, 15mm figures can be picked up and moved around a battlefield with little issue. you could also put them with 2 per a small sized Flames of War base so they don't seem so spread out over a huge area, in case you wanted to compact them into some ruined building, or play a Soviet horde with about 50 models per squad (Za Stalinaaaagh!!!). Actually, that two models per base thing was something I just thought of moments ago. I'm totally going to do that for my next squad. As an extra bonus due to their scale, weapon and movement ranges don't have to be halved and abstracted to fit a 6' by 4' table, adding the sense of mass combat on a grand scale. a whole company of infantry can be bought in flames of war company boxes at your local store for only about $50, leaving only tanks and miscellenia. point-wise, buying a squad of 3 tanks is like getting 3 Leman Russ' for much less than the price of one.

#2 Find an applicable rule set
The Warhammer WW2 mod availible from its respective yahoo group, which covers battles at a company scale (army lists are organized simialar to the Imperial Guard, with a platoon being a troop choice). For smaller scale games, Disposable Heroes by Iron Ivan Games will fit the bill, with half a squad operating as a single unit. They've stated that they've run games upwards of battalions with the rules, so it might fight our goals well.

#3 Start painting it up
Dude, they're 15mm, it can't take too long to paint them up. All you'd need is a basecoat, followed by a quick citadel wash of black or brown

#4 Start playing
You are now ready to go out and proves yourself a masterful general. Go forth. I have shown you the door, it's up to you to open it.