My Approach

I have developed a distinct approach to wargaming. Essentially, I switched from miniature wargaming to homebrew board wargames.

Boxed Sets

I am able to store all my gaming supplies in a few small boxes. Right now, I have these:

• a 6 x 8 x 2 inch box for land and naval battles. It includes dice, terrain, markers, and boards (green plains, brown desert, and blue sea boards)
• a 6 x 9 x 2 inch box with all my armies and fleets.
• a 6 x 8 x 1 inch box for air combat. It includes all items needed.

I have some more stuff, including racing chariots, meeples, and terrain for skirmishes, spread out across a number of other boxes. I just haven't got around to organizing them.

I recently created covers for my land and air boxes. I just need to print them out and slap them on.

The Battlefield

Right now, I'm using 5 x 7 inch boards for my battlefields. Essentially, I am designing and playing microgames.

Here are my 3 battlefields, sea, grass, and desert (sitting on an orange-ish place mat).

I went small because of space considerations. I usually only have a small portion of a coffee table available for games. My table can fit up to an 8.5 x 11 inch (A4 sized) board but I went smaller to fit the board easily into the boxes. A shift to an 8 x 10 inch battlefield is not out of the realm of possibility someday.

Terrain

I still use 3D terrain. I originally created the terrain pieces for 2mm miniature gaming.

Some of my terrain pieces.

I still use them because they look nice to me and they stand out more than 2D terrain. When my counters were on top of the 2D terrain, I found that the counters obscured the terrain. I don't have that problem with the 3D terrain.

The town on the hill (above) is an experiment with 2.5D terrain, such as these examples from Bob Cordery. They will give more space for counters than 3D terrain.

Counters

The inspiration for this new blog. Instead of miniatures, I am now gaming with flat, top-down counters.

My initial foray into counters looked like this.

However, I decided I wanted a more grand tactical and generic look.

In these new counters, I eschewed the detail of the first batch because it all got lost when I shrunk down the scale to fit more troops on a base. It also makes it much easier to change the uniform colors. I just select the "figures" in PowerPoint, click on format, and change the color. Painting should be so easy!

Another aspect of my approach is that I use generic figures. That means a stand can fill in for troops from any era that used formed blocks. For example, those red troops (sans cannon of course) could be Romans or Redcoats. This saves on space because I don't have to create armies for multiple eras. I do have armies in an array of colors, however. I find it easier to visualize if the colors are generally correct. So my Austrians wear white, Russians green, etc.

My generic armies for massed battles,

A couple of modern armies. They include infantry in skirmish order and armored vehicles.

Ships - both individual and based as squadrons. The ships are also generic and can fill in for navies from ancient times to today.

As I allude to above, I create the counters in PowerPoint. I then print them up on an adhesive address label - the big one with just one per sheet. I cut the counters out with scissors and then stick them to custom bases from Litko. For massed battles, I order 1 x 1/2 inch bases in brown plastic. They are 3mm thick, which makes it easier for me to pick them up.

The Rules

Technically, I could play just about any miniatures rules set with my set up, but I have created my own rules. I call them MicroBattle because I'm essentially playing a microgame.

MicroBattle is a gridded system, and is similar in many respects to Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame. MB's key feature is that I don't use long lists of modifiers to dice rolls. Instead, I just eyeball the situation and decide who has the advantage, then apply a single modifier based on this advantage. It greater speeds up play. It may not work for competitive gaming, but for solo it's perfect. My opponent tends to agree with my assessments!

Conclusion

Well, that's an overview of my current approach to wargaming. It probably is not for everyone, but it works for me.

Now that's enough wargame philosophy. Time to get back to battle! Stay tuned for a post this weekend about a couple of quick air combat games.