Skirmish Musings

My Current State of Gaming

Currently, I am well situated for land battle games.

My generic counters can handle pretty much any conflict from ancients to late 19th century.

Top: heavy and light infantry
Bottom: artillery and cavalry

I love the flexibility of my counters. I can use them to play any period that suddenly sparks my interest. I don't have to wait until I paint up a bunch of appropriate figures. Case in point - last month I got bitten by the Pyrrhic Wars bug. I posted about the project on September 4th and posted about a game on September 7th. I couldn't really do that with miniatures.

I also have generic modern counters that cover mechanized warfare.

This takes my gaming from the 20th century to the future!

What's Missing?

Recently I've been kicking around the idea of skirmish gaming. There have been a couple of inspirations.

• Shaun's Wargaming has a entertaining post with five skirmishes using Five Core Pulp.
• I've seen some posts (which I can't find now) about One-hour Ancient and Medieval Skirmish Wargames

These posts have stirred an interest in an occasional skirmish. My lack of individually based infantry counters kind of puts a damper on it though.

I could do squad based skirmishes. However, my generic counters are a bit bigger than a squad - the heavy infantry has 96 dots aka soldiers!

Thoughts about Counters

I've been toying with making some counters with individuals specifically for skirmish gaming. The question becomes: how should I go about it?

Meeples

I have meeples and used them before for RPG actions. I find them a bit gamey looking.

Standees

I also had an idea of creating standees using paper miniatures from Junior General or Wargame Vault. 

Junior General Romans

There are a couple of problems with this approach.

• How do I mount them? I'm thinking of wood blocks like Command & Colors. But I want them to be small (maybe 6-10mm in height) and finding blocks that size is problematic.
• They are not generic. I then get into the issue of having to make different blocks for each era and faction. Too much!

Top Down

I'm leaning toward top down counters, like these.

Some top downs from Two Hour Wargames's 5150

The biggest issue here is finding or creating counters that are generic enough but not so generic that they just look like dots. Dots are OK for mass formations but not skirmish.

Anyway, I need to play around with making counters. However, work and LARP have kept me very busy lately so I haven't had a chance.