One of the most fun things about wargaming is how well its scope scales. You can play literally one character in a squad as either a roleplaying game or a regimented skirmish game, you can play a whole detachment with anywhere from 10 to 100 models, or you can play with an entire regiment. Appropriately, when you adjust the scope of your game you may also choose to scale the models representing your army. Miniatures that are 28mm to 32mm tall are objectively small, but try fielding 200 of them and you quickly run out of space. To field a larger army, you need smaller individual soldiers. The more epic your game, the more diminutive your assets must be. It's for exactly that reason I backed Epic Warpath on Kickstarter, and since it came out I've been painting my 12mm soldiers. That, combined with the frequent 15mm posts I read on There could have been snakes blog has, I must confess, made me question my entire 28mm collection. I'm not actually going to forsake the 28mm scale [today], but I've been thinking a lot about the advantages of 12mm. In this post, I consider the advantages and disadvantages of a miniature even smaller than the usual miniature.
First, a note about scale. I'm using the measurement "28mm" generally to include models anywhere from 28mm to 30mm and 32mm. At any of those sizes, you get miniatures that look more or less like they comfortably exist in the same game universe. Sure, the 28mm models are a little smaller than the 32mm ones, but the difference is within an acceptable tolerance. After all, in the real world, I know people of the same age or height as me, and some are bigger, and probably there are some smaller. There's variation, and also there's a level of abstraction in plastic models that allows us to look at a unit of, say, lizard people, and compare them to super soldiers, and accept that one is bigger than the other and yet each have strengths and skills that makes them more or less an equal match in battle.
I'm using the measurement "12mm" to include anything from 12mm to 15mm. I'm not including single-digit scales, like 6mm, because I have no experience with those.
When I say that 12mm (or 15mm) is quick to paint, it's only partly because there's literally less surface area on a 12mm miniature than on a 28mm (or 32mm) miniature. There's also the matter of perception. When you paint a 28mm miniature, you generally have a threshold for what actually must have distinct paint on it, and that threshold is often defined by the pragmatism of what you'll actually notice from an arm's length away. We paint miniatures to play wargames with them, and when I'm painting 10 nearly identical soldiers for a squad within an army, I admit that sometimes I skip a buckle or a button here and there. I never paint eyes (admittedly, most of my soldiers have helmets so it doesn't even come up.) I'm happy to take these shortcuts because I know I'll never notice when I'm playing with the miniatures. Out of 10 soldiers way over there across the table, I will never be able to pinpoint which miniature is carrying a grenade with a silver pin in it, and which carries a grenade that just got a base coat of green and no further attention.
As you can imagine, 12mm grants you that kind of pragmatism, but more. A 12mm model may be impossibly detailed (or it may not be, you won't notice) but you'll likely not bother with every last button or grenade pin because you know you'll never see it except under a magnifying glass. And you don't play your games with a magnifying glass.
It's easy to paint pragmatically in 12mm scale. Even if you do set out to paint highly detailed 12mm miniatures, what counts as highly detailed is different to what it means in 28mm. High detail in 12mm might involve 4 or 5 different colours of paint, while 28mm often means 12 or 15 colours once you start highlighting every last fold in a uniform and every last component of a gun or a crossbow. Everything is smaller in 12mm, even when you choose to go big.
The counterpoint to this is that 12mm can start to feel routine. One of the ways I make it fun for myself to paint 10 or 20 of essentially the same soldier in 28mm scale is by giving each soldier one unique thing. Soldier #1 has a red bandanna tied around his arm, but Soldier #2 has an orange bandanna. Soldier #3 has a gun that's finely polished, but Soldier #4 has a gun that's oily (hey, talk to his sergeant about that, not me.) Soldier #5 has brown leather boots instead of regulation black, and there's a whole backstory about why that is. And so on. Little touches like that make the painting process entertaining by introducing an interesting choice, and usually also inspiring some thought about narrative reasons I've made the choice I've made.
I like those detail choices because, unlike the choice of painting each individual button or not, it's something I do notice on the gaming table. When I'm looking down at a squad of 10 soldiers, I do notice that one has a rifle with polished wood stock and the other doesn't, or that one has a red bandanna and the other orange, and so on. It gives them each a little bit of character.
In 12mm, you don't have as many choices because the soldiers are just too small. Either they lack the detail you need to inspire an interesting choice, or the detail is too small for you to manage, or it's too small for you to realistically ever notice during play.
Conclusion: Buy 12mm if you want something quick and fun to paint. Buy 28mm if you want to paint lots of detail.
Here's the thing about wargames. I like the concept of what-you-see-is-what-you-get but, more often than not, the reality is that I play what-the-data-card-says-is-what-you-get. I mix and match miniatures in my game, and some rule sets just don't align with the miniatures I'm using. Sometimes, as much as it pains me to do it, I have to look at a miniature carrying an axe and decide to treat it as having a sword.
Sacrificing detail for size, 12mm miniatures are a friendly reminder for me that miniatures are just tokens. I don't look at a 12mm miniature to confirm whether it's definitely got a holstered pistol before rolling a pistol attack for it. I just accept, because the miniature is so impossibly small, that its data card says it has a pistol, and so I take it on faith. It's kind of beautiful.
Beautiful though it may be to accept that the game rules determine a miniature's load-out, it also kind of sends me into a spiral of logic exercises that ends in the (very pragmatic) realisation that I may as well just be using coloured blocks instead of miniatures. I'm not wrong, and obviously there are some venerable old wargames that do exactly that. Miniatures are not required for a game of strategy and tactics. They're just the superficial element that makes it fun.
I'm comfortable admitting that I'm like a little sparkle in my games. It's silly, but whether it's a video game or a tabletop game, I enjoy the look of the game as much as I do the rules. I can play a game exclusively for its rules, and obviously I do that a lot when playtesting a new game. But once a game is developed and shipping, I enjoy making it visually appealing, at least to whatever degree I feel I need.
At the 28mm to 32mm scale, the level of detail is just right for full immersion in the game world. Those details are small, but they are there and you are generally aware of them even from an arm's length away. You may not notice whether the clasp of a pistol holster is painted metallic or not, but you see that there is a pistol holster. You may not notice whether the pins of each grenade has been painted, but you see the row of grenades on that bandoleer. You get enough detail to make it feel like you're on a nearby hill overlooking the battle, rather than feeling like you're miles away only hearing about it.
Conclusion: Buy 12mm if you want to treat your miniatures as tokens, and 28mm if you want to treat your miniatures like action figures.
When the only miniatures I owned were the ones that came in board games like Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu or Mansions of Madness, I didn't have to think about storing miniatures. The miniatures stored themselves. They were just in the box they came in.
Little did I know that "real" miniatures didn't work that way. Once you start playing miniature wargames, you amass a hundred or more miniatures, each meticulously painted, and they all came as a flatpacked model kit. There's no box to store them in, and even if there was you'd need to store them in a way that they don't scratch each other's paint off, or snap each other's bayonets or spears, and so on.
I don't have that problem with 12mm miniatures. A 12mm miniature is less than half the height of a 28mm miniature, they don't have that much surface area to protect, so you can just kind of store them anywhere. I mostly just [carefully] pile them into the box they came in. I didn't feel compelled to buy a special storage contained for them. They're 12mm. Should the paint scratch, I can just hit them with another broad stroke of grey or khaki. It's easy.
To be fair, 28mm isn't impossible to store. Most of my miniatures at both 12mm and 28mm scale end up on a 25mm base (because more than one 12mm model fits on a 25mm base), so lining them up in a box is functionally the same regardless of scale. 28mm miniatures do admittedly tend to get tangled up with one another, but as long as you're careful when removing them from storage there's little risk of snapping anything off. It does frustrate me that so many companies sell miniature kits in boxes that cannot then be repurposed as storage containers, but I also understand why that is. They're models, and it makes sense to flatpack them and leave the storage arrangement up to the user. I get it, I just wish storage didn't take up as much space as it did.
The storage issue does, however, serve as a limiter for me. It's easy to imagine that it would be best to have a distinct miniature for every individual named character you invent for a campaign. But realistically, exactly one miniature can play the role of many different characters. And when you're faced with finding a place to store a miniature you're thinking of purchasing or just reusing an existing miniature in your collection, the reality of limited space often wins out.
Even at 12mm scale, there's an upper limit of how many miniatures you can store, so the problem isn't actually storage, it's flexibility. And both scales are as flexible as your imagination.
Conclusion: Consider storage space before buying any scale of miniatures.
You can get 184 miniatures at 12mm for the same price you can get 10 or 20 miniatures in 28mm scale. The logic is fairly self-evident. "They" can fit more 12mm figures than 28mm figures on a single sprue, and because 12mm miniatures don't have that many build options (if any), the sprue is often just soldiers.
Everything is relative. Buying things is not, by definition, cheap. It costs money. You might get "more" 12mm than 28mm, but you can reverse your cost savings by spending more money on yet more miniatures. Or you can vow to buy just 8 figures at any scale and save lots of money. Or you can not buy any and save 100% of your money.
Conclusion: Wargaming is as cheap, or not, as you want it to be. It depends on your own expectations and spending habits. Done well, miniatures are a creative and reasonable hobby. Done poorly, at any scale, you can spend way too much money on toys you never use.
The basic humanoid soldier in an army essentially sets the scale of everything around it. If a human soldier is 28mm tall, then a tank must be large enough for you to believe that 28mm soldiers could fit into it.
At 12mm scale, a big tank doesn't have to be all that big, because its occupants are small. Aircraft doesn't have to be very big. Giant battle mechs no larger than 54mm tower over your tiny little 12mm soldiers. And the whole army still fits into a single box in your backpack.
Honestly, it feels a little liberating.
With my Epic Warpath and Battletech forces combined, I have an enormous and diverse army, and it literally all fits into a single Battletech box.
On the other hand, my beloved Imperial Knight for Warhammer 40,000 truly does tower over my 28mm soldiers. It's about 1900mm tall, so as miniatures go, it's not terribly miniature. It's a joy to put out on the table, though.
Conclusion: "Epic" is a matter of comparison. A 28mm+ miniature towers over a 12mm model, but only a 54mm+ miniature dwarfs a 28mm model. As with storage, assess the space you have available, and choose the size of your miniatures accordingly.
The thing about 28mm is that it's really really common. When you go to buy a miniature, much less a whole army of miniatures, most of what's available is 28mm (or 32mm, nobody's really counting) scale. If you want to game at 12mm or 15mm, then you're confining yourself to a niche within a niche. It can be a nice niche, but it can be a frustrating niche when you want something and discover nobody's making it at less than 28mm.
It goes beyond just the models, too. When you invest in a 12mm army, you're quickly reminded that the rest of the gaming world has invested in the 28mm scale. The grids on battle maps assume you're playing with 28mm miniatures, most terrain pieces you can buy assume you're playing with 28mm miniatures, most game rules assume you're using 28mm, and on and on. It's not impossible to adapt everything for 12mm (especially because even at 12mm the bases are usually 25mm and up), but that's something you have to adapt. If you play with 28mm, everything is just built to work with your miniatures.
Conclusion: The world wants 28mm to be the standard. Be aware that if you go against that, you might have to forge your own path.
If you love the process of building models, then 12mm is not the right scale for you. At 12mm, most miniatures come in one solid piece of plastic. You don't get to choose which weapon or head to attach, you just clip the figure off the sprue and glue it to a base.
Miniatures at 28mm usually have many more options, and lots of potential for creativity. You can stick torsos and legs together as you please, you can choose between several weapons, maybe choose whether to include a shield, maybe attach some pouches and holsters and grenades, and so on. If you love the model building aspect of miniature wargaming, then 28mm is probably where you want to be.
Conclusion: If part of your fun of wargaming is building models, then 28mm is probably the smart choice. While you can modify 12mm models, many ship as one piece so you're unlikely to collect a "bits box" full of spare parts (because there are no parts, unless you cut up spare models yourself).
I don't know whether my musings are very useful, because I think most people stumble (as I did) into 28mm before they even know to ponder what scale they want. If I could do it all over again, maybe I'd have preferred 12mm games. But then again, when I started wargaming there weren't any modern "epic" scale games for me to stumble into. Had I known to look for such a thing, I probably could have found something, but I only discovered the 12mm scale thanks to Legiones Imperialis and Epic Warpath. And buying my historical miniatures was difficult enough without trying to find them in 12mm scale.
Maybe 12mm is aspirational, or maybe it's just part of the wargamer's toolkit. I'm happy with my 12mm army, and maybe if all armies were available at 12mm I would choose it as my default. Or maybe going so small would break the illusion and I'd just start playing wargames on paper. It could be a slippery slope.
Wargaming with miniatures, and building battlefields and campaigns , is fun at both 12mm and 28mm scales. And, as HG Wells famously said, these little wars are infinitely superiour to actual war. So whatever war you wage, the real key is to keep it under 54mm.
I don't know of that many 12mm miniature outlets, but here are some vendors that offer 12mm or 15mm lines:
Miniatures photo by Seth Kenlon.