Monday, July 16, 2018

Changing Direction

I'm not happy playing Age of Sigmar.  I thought maybe I could make it work, but it's just not the right game for me.  So, I've put out some feelers and might have a couple guys who'll take my army off my hands piecemeal.  And if I'm being honest with myself, I don't see myself putting in the level of work to get a Kings of War army off the ground either. 

Outside of Frostgrave and miniatures for role-playing games, I'm feeling just about done with 28mm scale.  And a big chunk of this is that we're getting ready to move out of our current apartment and into a new one in a few weeks, and in preparation I've largely packed up my miniatures stuff.  It ended up being a lot bigger of a pile than I expected, even with some pretty darn good Tetris'ing to get various boxes packed into a big plastic tote. 

So I've been doing some heavy thinking today, and I keep circling back around to an idea I've come back to a number of times in the past without pulling the trigger on: 1/72 scale plastic figures.  They're inexpensive ($11-$17 for around 40-50 infantry or a dozen cavalry), they'll take up less space to store, and the sculpting has improved significantly since I was a kid (although those old kits I used to see in my dad's monthly Squadron catalog are still on the market in most cases). 

The big stumbling block in my thinking in the past was getting someone interested in playing with me in that scale; and I think I've found the work-around.  Solo wargaming.  Yes, yes, "playing with myself" jokes aside, it does lose some of the social aspect of wargaming, but at the same time, gaming on my schedule, with the rules of my choice, is definitely appealing. 

As for rulesets, I'm leaning towards Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames, which I first picked up almost four years ago now.  I think a couple boxes of figures would make for a really enjoyable winter's solo campaign.  My current inclination is a couple boxes of Zvezda Hundred Years' War English and a few of Dark Alliances' Tolkien-inspired Orcs; run the English as a generic medieval human kingdom using the Medieval rules from One-Hour Wargames, and run the Orcs using the Dark Ages list to represent their lighter armor and looser organization. 

4 comments:

  1. OHW is great. We like Rifle & Sabre the most. We also play ACW and Machine Age.

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    1. Forgot to say look at 10mm figures. Inexpensive and do the job well.

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  2. We've done some gaming in 1:72 before: lots of WWII scenario stuff. We did a beautiful Market Garden Arnhem game in 1:72.

    Personally:

    From a hobby perspective, I believe it's the worst of scales. It's too large a scale to permit the shortcuts that 15mm allows and too small a scale to have the quality detail that you get at 28mm. It's often in a _very_ crappy material.

    From a GAMING perspective, though, it's the greatest of scales. You can work with individual models at the scale (which I find more satisfying than moving stands around), but at the smaller scale you can get more realistic weapon ranges and more interesting room for maneuver.

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  3. Also: set your AoS Figures on a large multi-model infantry base. Now you have a Kings of War army. That's all it takes.

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