Despite using miniatures in roleplaying games for years, it wasn't until I started playing wargames that I learned about miniature bases. And boy was I not prepared. A miniature base is the little plastic disc (or square or hexagon) that wargamers glue to the bottom of their models. To my great surp...
Popular wargames like Warhammer and Frostgrave and Deadzone have specially designed miniatures for them. This allows rulebooks to refer to a specific and exact miniature, alleviating any confusion about what size that model is meant to be, what uniform it's meant to be wearing, what weapons it...
Battle at the Farm is the first Warhammer 40,000 scenario ever published, way back in 1987 as a sample adventure in Rogue Trader. Back then, it was assumed that you'd have a Games Master (GM) running the game, and the game system was basically just Warhammer Fantasy dressed in space suits. To...
If you'd told me years ago that LEGO sets and wargaming modelling were in many ways the same hobby, I wouldn't have believed you. But a few years ago, a weird thing happened and I stumbled into wargaming, and I started building models and painting and playing the game, and yes, they're basically the...
In previous blog posts, I've lamented the lack of historical miniatures where I live and how that forced me to use a Carthaginian army as my Romans, and an Ancient Egyptian army for my Ptolemaic army. Very recently, a local mini reseller added a proper Roman army, so I sent my Carthaginians back to...
In a wargame, you frequently have 20 or 30 or even 100 miniatures in your army. This can be confusing for a few reasons, not the least of which the sheer number of physical objects you have to keep track of. Each miniature generally gets to move and attack, and may also be subject to morale checks o...
I've written about roleplay and roleplaying in reverse in wargames, but the only reason I have the luxury of waxing poetic about additional options for wargaming is because it's such a flexible system. Roleplay can fit nicely into a wargame, just as much as a wargame fits nicely into an RPG (tha...
Some time ago, I thought that it would be nice to have spaceship miniatures for Starfinder space battles. I developed a simplified system for Starfinder ship combat, which is currently a Copper Seller on DrivethruRPG, so I do actually do run ship combat pretty frequently. So I got some (more about...
Here's the thing. I bought the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness boxed set because it has a bunch of Mk VI (beaky) space marines in it. Originally, I'd intended only to use those models with 10th Edition rules, but the Age of Darkness box comes with a 400 page rulebook in it, and I'm nothing if not...
I've been playing Mansions of Madness a lot lately, which is a game I love but also one that inspires a lot of thought about strategy and roleplay. In a tabletop roleplaying game, like Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder or Shadowrun, you often make up a strategy based on how you think your...
I picked up the Black Ops wargame, written by Guy Bowers and published by Osprey Games, and have had a great time playing it. This is my review of it as a book and as a game system.
The Black Ops book is in the ubiquitous blue book series by Osprey, so it's the usual 64 pages sprinkled with te...
About 6 years ago, I bought a set of hero miniatures by Wizkids. They weren't the first miniatures I'd ever bought, but at the time they were the nicest, partly because they were already painted in the box (I didn't think I was capable of painting miniatures back then, and to be fair didn't really...
I read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Indomitus by Gav Thorpe, and this is my review. This post contains spoilers.
You know how there are episodes of Star Trek (TOS and TNG) where our heroes beams down to a planet to save a civilisation in peril, and then there are episodes of Star Trek where our...
We humans seem to really enjoy miniaturized versions of real world objects. We have doll houses and action figures and model trains and miniatures for gaming. I'm new to the game miniature world, and being new means I get the privilege of making a bunch of mistakes. Here's what I've learnt about the...
I have a handful of early Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine miniatures, which I purchased on TradeMe just to practise painting back when I was just starting to explore the wargaming hobby. I don't intend to play the 3rd edition of Warhammer 40,000 but nevertheless I thought it might be fun to...
Monsters attack ancient Rome! Can your legionaries defeat them? I've been playing Broken Legions by Mark Latham, published by Osprey Games, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. I picked up the book because I like alternate history, and also because this seemed like an excellent excuse t...