J Arcane
10-07-2008, 01:03 PM
I like miniatures games. A lot. Unfortunately, miniatures games tend to cost lots of money. Well, some of them do anyway. So I'm always looking at cheaper ways to get the gameplay I want without dealing with the insane cost involved.
One of the ways in which I've recently set about doing so, is just making paper minis. I've designed a custom template for making paper miniatures over at my website (http://jarcane.info/files/make-your-own-paper-minis.html), and have been engaged in slowly assembling some 40K armies in paper form. So far all I've got is a Space Marine Tactical Squad sheet designed, but they came out looking quite nice.
One of the other things I've considered recently is 15mm minis. Put simply, they're cheap, dirt cheap, even the Epic 40k ones you can buy in fairly impressive bulk by GW standards. Flames of War is a great source for WWII looking sorts as well. Normally of course they're designed for stand style games, with several minis glued to a single base. But I thought, why not just base them individually instead, for single man scale games? I mean, most games the movement isn't to scale with the model anyway, so you could even use the same measurement scale and get kind of a greater feeling of scope to the battles, or you could scale down measurements to match, maybe go cm instead of inches, and be able to game in 1/3 the table space, for those of us with cramped apartments and tiny tables.
I'm also thinking it'd be cool to get ahold of some more of those 1/72 scale WWII figs like I used to have. It's kind of hard to argue with getting a whole box of 24 soldiers for like $5. The Tamiya figs I got did come with a few in each box that weren't exactly well posed for normal basing, but most of them served quite well as a Stargrunt II army once glued onto some 25mm bases.
There's also that bit of instructions I got off 4chan on how to cast your own resin models (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/J_Arcane/resinminimolding.jpg) with some fairly cheap materials you can find in most hardware stores. It'd be a great way to mass produce that DQ Slime army I was always wanting to do for Aetherverse.
Two of the best games for this kind of thing too, I've found, are Stargrunt II, and Aetherverse. Both are great, fun games, the former being the most accurate yet easy-to-learn simulation of modern fire combat I've ever seen, and the latter being awesome in it's incredible flexibility. Both are generic systems, which means you can assemble an army from pretty much whatever you've got laying around, which makes them prime games for getting good minis fun without the monetary outlay.
Age of Battles was also a pretty nifty one I played once, a Russian developed game focused on historical combat, which was quite nice because each boxed set came with all you needed to play a full battle, bases minis and all, for like $40-$50. Just make sure to wash the sprues before assembling, as they coat the soft plastic with some kind of weird wax or something that seems to repel all known glues. Russia in fact seems to produce an unusual number of very cheap miniatures and games, there was another one called Robogear I never got into that one of the stores in Vancouver sold.
This sort of talk is, of course, total heresy to the attitudes of a lot of the mainstream players I used to deal with back in the day, who seemed to view how much they spent on their army as an extension of their penis, and anyone else beneath them, but for the rest of us who can't afford to mortgage their house for a game, it's always interesting the kind of creative tricks and things you can come up with to get the game without making your wallet cry in the process.
One of the ways in which I've recently set about doing so, is just making paper minis. I've designed a custom template for making paper miniatures over at my website (http://jarcane.info/files/make-your-own-paper-minis.html), and have been engaged in slowly assembling some 40K armies in paper form. So far all I've got is a Space Marine Tactical Squad sheet designed, but they came out looking quite nice.
One of the other things I've considered recently is 15mm minis. Put simply, they're cheap, dirt cheap, even the Epic 40k ones you can buy in fairly impressive bulk by GW standards. Flames of War is a great source for WWII looking sorts as well. Normally of course they're designed for stand style games, with several minis glued to a single base. But I thought, why not just base them individually instead, for single man scale games? I mean, most games the movement isn't to scale with the model anyway, so you could even use the same measurement scale and get kind of a greater feeling of scope to the battles, or you could scale down measurements to match, maybe go cm instead of inches, and be able to game in 1/3 the table space, for those of us with cramped apartments and tiny tables.
I'm also thinking it'd be cool to get ahold of some more of those 1/72 scale WWII figs like I used to have. It's kind of hard to argue with getting a whole box of 24 soldiers for like $5. The Tamiya figs I got did come with a few in each box that weren't exactly well posed for normal basing, but most of them served quite well as a Stargrunt II army once glued onto some 25mm bases.
There's also that bit of instructions I got off 4chan on how to cast your own resin models (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/J_Arcane/resinminimolding.jpg) with some fairly cheap materials you can find in most hardware stores. It'd be a great way to mass produce that DQ Slime army I was always wanting to do for Aetherverse.
Two of the best games for this kind of thing too, I've found, are Stargrunt II, and Aetherverse. Both are great, fun games, the former being the most accurate yet easy-to-learn simulation of modern fire combat I've ever seen, and the latter being awesome in it's incredible flexibility. Both are generic systems, which means you can assemble an army from pretty much whatever you've got laying around, which makes them prime games for getting good minis fun without the monetary outlay.
Age of Battles was also a pretty nifty one I played once, a Russian developed game focused on historical combat, which was quite nice because each boxed set came with all you needed to play a full battle, bases minis and all, for like $40-$50. Just make sure to wash the sprues before assembling, as they coat the soft plastic with some kind of weird wax or something that seems to repel all known glues. Russia in fact seems to produce an unusual number of very cheap miniatures and games, there was another one called Robogear I never got into that one of the stores in Vancouver sold.
This sort of talk is, of course, total heresy to the attitudes of a lot of the mainstream players I used to deal with back in the day, who seemed to view how much they spent on their army as an extension of their penis, and anyone else beneath them, but for the rest of us who can't afford to mortgage their house for a game, it's always interesting the kind of creative tricks and things you can come up with to get the game without making your wallet cry in the process.