My Introduction To Historical Wargaming: Part 2

Step 1: Choose a Period
If you are going to get into historical wargaming, your first step will likely be choosing a historical period to game. This may already be done for you, since your interest in a particular war or period might be what gets you into historical gaming to begin with. That was the case for me. I was interested in the American Civil War, and my friend was interested in Napoleonics. So I was searching for a set of rules that worked for both eras, or a set that had versions or supplements that covered both, so that hopefully we wouldn't have to learn two completely different sets of rules to play in the eras we were each most interested in. Later I would realized that I will probably try out many different rule sets for both periods, so trying to find one rule set that worked for us both was probably not that important. But that's what I was trying to do at the time.

Step 2: Choose a Scale
By this I mean what size of battle you want your game to represent. Do you want to play a small skirmish with a handful of individual soldiers? Do you want to refight Waterloo in the role of Napoleon or Wellington, ordering around divisions or entire corps? I skipped this step at first, not realized it was a step. But once you start trying to find a rule set, it will be important to figure this out before you can decide on one. The major factor to consider here is going to be what size formation you want an individual model or base or unit in the game to represent. This, combined with how much gaming space you have and now many miniatures you have will determine how big of a battle you can represent with your game. For example, if a unit a certain size represents a regiment of several hundred men, the number of such units you can reasonably fit on your gaming table is going to limit the size of battle you can represent. But if each unit of that same size represents a brigade of several regiments, now you can fight a much larger battle, but you have less control over the detailed movements of your army, since individual regiments are no longer represented.

This is obviously a matter of personal taste, and will depend upon what about the fighting in your chosen historical period you find most interesting. Are you most interested in the grand battle plans of an army commander positioning his corps and trying to make the best use of the attributes of his subordiates? Are you interested in the decisions facing an individual soldier in a squad? After reading reviews and descriptions of many different rulesets for horse and musket era battles, I decided that I wanted a unit in my games to represent an individual regiment. This would allow me to make decisions in the game about what formations to have my regiments in, and how they would be positioned in relation to each other in the brigade, which a brigade-level game would not allow. Also, there were many distinct noteworthy regiments in the American Civil War that I wanted to be able to specifically represent on the table. So, I would be looking for a set of rules where the smalled unit that operated on the table was the regiment.

Step 3: Choose a Set of Rules
With the scale of battle you want to fight figured out, you can start looking around for a good set of rules. There are lots of them out there for all kinds of historical periods, but it can sometimes be difficult to find good ones, good descriptions or reviews of the ones you can find, or places to order them from. One extremely helpful resource for me, which I found early on in my search, was The Miniatures Page Message Boards. They are broken up by historical period, and there are lots of helpful people there willing to share their opinions on various rule sets and miniatures. I got a lot of information from people there. It is especially handy to have some reviews or battle reports to read when you're trying to find a rule set online and you can't flip through the book to get an idea of what the rules are like. Being used to Warhammer and other games by Games Workshop, I couldn't help but notice the significantly lower production values for most of these historical rule sets. They don't really have the glossy full-color pages full of magnificently painted miniatures. And often the descriptions of the rules found online were somewhat lacking in detail. So it's definitely worth asking around at a message board, or trying to find a battle report online that uses the rules you are considering.

Aside from that, you'll just have to do searches for what you're looking for and start keeping track of companies that make rules for the period you are interested in, and eventually narrow it down to one that you want to try. Another option is to download some Free Wargames Rules. There are a lot of homegrown rule sets that people have written up and put out there for download. So you could try out some of those first to get an idea of the kinds of things you like or don't like, or even what scale of battle you prefer to fight, before you spend the money to order a set of rules. Or you may just find something you think is just right.

After reading many positive reviews and a couple of really fun sounding battle reports for it, I decided to go with a ruleset called Field of Battle by a company called Piquet. I ordered it from Warweb.com. You can find the Field of Battle rules here. They work for the American Civil War and Napoleonic periods, among others, and I also liked how people described the uncertainty of the command and control system of the game, which keeps the players from having complete control over what happens so they have to learn to react to the unexpected vagaries of war.

Step 4: Choose a Miniature Scale
The next step is to decide what sized miniatures you want to game with. This is usually given as a number of milimeters measured on a normal standing infantry figure from the bottom of his feet to his eye level. I suppose they don't just give the height of the figure because this would vary based on the kind of headgear the figure is wearing, and how much height that adds to the figure. The common sizes I have come across are 2mm, 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, 25mm, and 28mm. Rarely miniature sizes are given as a ratio of miniature size to life size, such as 1:285 for 6mm miniatures.

You might have to choose your miniature scale before choosing a set of rules if you really have a strong preference. But I've found that most of the potential rules sets I've come across in my own search can be used with many different sizes of miniatures. If specific unit sizes are critial, they mostly rely on a certain base size, and you can put however many miniatures you want on the base. It seems uncommon, though not unheard of, for the number of models in a unit, rather than the number of bases, to be important. But for some game scales, certain miniature sizes may not be possible. For example, there probably aren't a lot of skirmish level games, where on miniature represents an individual soldier, that are designed to be played with 6mm miniatures. But still, if you altered all the distances in the rules, I'm sure you could play that way.

Aside from all that, the choice of miniature size will most likely be purely aesthetic, or possibly partially financial. I had chosen a set of rules where a unit of several bases would represent a regiment of several hundred men. I wanted to use small miniatures, so that on the table a unit would look more like a big regiment of men packed together in a line. I think this looks much better than using a handful of larger scale miniatures, which just doesn't look anything like what you're trying to represent. Of course, with units being regiments, each miniature is going to represent many actual men no matter what scale I use, but I wanted to get as close as I could to the look of a regiment while still being able to fit them on my gaming table. And I wanted the miniatures to still look good up close. I had it narrowed down to either 6mm or 10mm, and my decision would be based on the prices and quality of the miniatures that were available in those scales.

My Introduction To Historical Wargaming: Part 3

My Introduction To Historical Wargaming: Part 1

A while ago, I took my first tentative steps into the world of historical miniature wargaming. I thought I would share with you all some recollections of the beginning of that journey. For those who are not already historical wargamers, it may serve as a guide for getting started. For those who are, perhaps it will bring up fond memories of how you started out in the hobby.

Though I didn't realize it at the time, my desire to do historical wargaming actaully started a long time ago. You can kind of see its genesis in some of my other blog posts. When putting together my Warhammer Fantasy Empire army, I was drawn to having lots of cannons and lines of handgunners and units of pistol-armed cavalry. I realize now that what I was trying to do was to simulate what I really wanted to have, which was a civil war style army. I had long been fascinated by that style of warfare; maneuvering long regiments into lines of battle, blazing cannons, devastating volleys of fire, interesting personalities of the commanding officers. It just didn't occur to me at the time that I could actually play what I really wanted to play: a historical wargame set in the American Civil War.

Then came the spark that ignited the powder keg. While browsing an online gaming forum that mostly catered to Games Workshop stuff, I came across this link: Warlord Games Announces Black Powder.

It was an introduction to an upcoming rule set called Black Powder, which would contain rules for miniature wargaming in the "horse and musket" period, roughly 1700 to 1900. It was being written by Rick Priestley and Jervis Johnson, who had worked on a lot of stuff for Games Workshop that I liked. And I really liked a lot of what was said in the introduction, especially the intentionally non-competative nature of the game, since I had been getting sick of the competetive nature that Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 had moved towards. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing I had been wanting to play, and had been trying to approximate with my gunpowder themed Warhammer Fantasy Empire army.

I wasn't sure if anyone else I knew would be interested in historical wargaming, but I have a friend who I have had several discussions with about the interesting style of warfare in the Civil War and Napoleonic wars (my interest being primarily in the former, his the latter). So I sent the link to him, and he also thought it sounded like fun. Unfortunately, that particular set of rules had not yet been released, nor was there any kind of expected release date listed. So we had no idea how long we'd have to wait to play this game. In the meantime, I decided to to search around on the internet for other similar rules. I figured there were probably already other rules for playing Civil War or Napoleonic battles. I had no idea. So, down the rabbit hole I went.

My Introduction To Historical Wargaming: Part 2

Mighty Empires Tiles

Here are some pictures of my painted Games Workshop Mighty Empires map tiles. They were originally posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008.

Painting these map tiles was definitely different than anything else I have painted before. As you can see, I tried a lot of different colors and styles, but I never really found a method of painting them that I was happy with. So I don't have much advice for painting map tiles.

Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine Chapter

I'm starting to paint my chapter of Chaos Space Marines. They're going to be mostly black, with bone colored helmets and trim. The intention is for them to look intimidating when they attack an enemy in the darkness, with only their bone colored helmets/trim and the white skull icons on their shoulder pads showing. There is a whole long backstory to my renegade Space Marine chapter, but I'll get into that more in the future as I get more of them painted and develop the story more.

For now, I'm trying to come up with a good look for them, and a good method for achieving what I'm going for. But I need some opinions. I've tried four different methods of getting somewhat bone colored helmets. But I don't want them to be straight white, since I think completely black and white models would look pretty boring. Anyway, here's a of picture of what I've tried so far.



So, which do you think looks the best? Anyone have thoughts on how to improve the look?

Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine Vehicles

Here are some pictures of a Rhino and a Predator I painted for my Chaos Space Marine chapter. These are the first vehicles I've ever painted. The pictures were originally posted on Sunday, May 18, 2008.



The color scheme I decided on for my Chaos Space Marine chapter is mostly black with bone colored highlights, so those are the colors on the vehicles. Painting vehicles is interesting. It took a few coats to cover those big, flat spaces completely without having streaks. And it took a few coats to paint the bone color over the black.

There are a lot of boring flat areas, so I used some decals to make it more interesting. The icon of my chapter is a white skull, so I put some skulls on the front. I also used transfers to add numbers and some writing. The twin-linked bolter on the Predator is attached by magnet, so I can take it off and replace it with a havok launcher if needed.

Warhammer 40,000 Thousand Sons

Here are some pictures of a unit of Thousand Sons Chaos Space Marines I painted. The pictures were originally posted on my previous blog on Friday, December 21, 2007.



The gold parts were painted using metallic gold paint, and they turned out really nice. The icons on the shoulder pads are transfers. They were pretty difficult to get on, because I was trying to apply them to a curved surface. So I had to put some slices in the transfers and overlap the edges a little while wrapping them around the curved part of the shoulder pad. It worked out okay.

The skulls on the sorcerer's shoulder pad and bolt pistol were just painted a tan color, and then had a brown or possibly chestnut ink applied. I wanted the force weapon he is carrying to look like it was glowing purple with psychic energy, but I don't really know how to paint something so that it looks like it is glowing.

Warhammer Fantasy Terrain

Here's a terrain piece I made for Warhammer Fantasy of out of some random stuff I had. I use at as either an Ancient Idol or a Fell Ruin, or just a decorative piece of terrain. These pictures were originally posted on Friday, August 17, 2007.



I like how the marble look of the stone turned out. The base is just made out of cardboard. I painted it black, and then blotted dark grey on it with a thick brush to get the mottled look. Then I painted the veins on with thinned black paint.

I also really like how the book looks. Let me know what you think.