The Decline and Fall of 2mm Napoleonics

A couple months back, I posted about my burgeoning interest in 2mm Napoleonic wargaming using 3-D printed figure blocks from Forward March Studios, and (brimming with confidence) promised more details soon to come...

Well, I can definitely say I gave it the old college try.

I ordered the figures and buildings from a couple different professional 3-D printing services and got out an old sheet of acrylic plastic I'd bought for wargaming, determined to paint it up to look like the rather clever sheets featured on the Forward March blog. I got my copy of the Et Sans Resultat rules and read through the rulebook. I assembled a list of units and devised a basing scheme.

Forgive the poor late-night lighting...

That single base is as far as I ever got.

In retrospect, the whole process was a lot more hassle than I'd anticipated, from printing problems to the whole acrylic sheet thing not really working out to the assembly of bases and labels to overall dissatisfaction with the scale. This latter point was really brought home to me when I recently completed a painting commission on some 28mm Napoleonic cavalry. Damn but those figures look fine, and I can see the appeal of the scale (even if I'd want a good-sized table to play at that size, even for something on the level of General de Brigade).

Not saying I want to get into 28mm. Not saying that at all. But returning to my 2mm last night, I just...couldn't. They're way too abstract. I realize minis wargaming is, essentially, just using three-dimensional counters at the end of the day, but these are a little too close to the "wargames counter" experience for me to get really excited about it from a minis wargaming perspective.

Besides, I recently discovered the Pub Battles line. That's basically the experience I envisioned when I first started thinking about this whole crazy 2mm project, and looks like something definitely worth checking out—might as well just go "full wargame" at this point, eh? (And hey, maybe I can figure out a way to integrate my 2mm blocks into the Pub Battles system?)

Regardless, it'll be a while before I find out—those Pub Battles games are expensive and a bit too bespoke for a casual purchase. I'm not that much of a hardcore wargamer! Something for next year, perhaps.

In the meantime, I found that, between my own projects, commissioned projects, and my day job as a writer and editor, I was straining my hands and experiencing some incipient carpal tunnel pain! That's a big uh-oh in my line of work, and obviously something has to give. I just finished one commission and will be finishing up the second over the next couple weeks. After that, I won't be doing any more commission work for the remainder of the year; I'll check back in with my hands next year and see if I want to pick that back up.

(Not that commission work is a big income stream for me or anything. Just a nice way to earn some supplemental hobby cash, and it can certainly lie dormant for a while.)

Even with my own projects, I'll be taking things (even more) slowly. I have an interesting DBA project I've been working on in fits and starts, and I'll be returning to that shortly, as it's pretty easy on the ol' paint hand. Pics to follow once I'm done (sometime around Christmas at the rate I've been going...).

"I need the biggest pair of lobster tongs you have...no, that's too big..."

I'm having a lot of fun experimenting with GW's contrast paints (shhh, don't tell anybody!), as well as the novelty of custom bases from Secret Weapon. These two factors have meant that 40K has dominated my recent painting time, which has been spotty at best over the summer.

Nevertheless, I'm quite happy with what's been rolling off the ol' paint-spattered desk lately:

Not Back on It...Still on It

I am a gaming autodidact.

By this I mean that I never had a mentor or group who showed me the way into the world of tabletop gaming. No older sibling or cousin to pass down their chipped miniatures and tattered manuals, no group of my peers to welcome me in.

No sir, starting around the age of 12, it was all cobbled together by yours truly from the pages of Dragon, White Dwarf, and the Wargames West catalog, punctuated by trips to my not-so-friendly local gaming store. Due to accidents of demographics and timing, I didn't meet any fellow "seasoned gamers" until I was well into my teens—by which point that crowd was a year or two younger than me (a lifetime in adolescent world!).

I say all this as a preliminary to the reason why I'm announcing...

See, in the process of teaching myself about the hobby, I became determined to master the Big Three: RPGs, miniatures wargaming, and board wargaming. These ventures have met with varying degrees of success and failure over the years. RPGs are unquestionably my greatest arena of success, but there were times over the years where I could have just as easily veered off into miniatures wargaming as my prime tabletop gaming outlet. (Board wargaming, sadly, has never been more than a footnote.)

Because I came into the hobby circa 1990, and at an impressionable age at that, many of the Old Ways of the Hobby impressed themselves into my tender brain. In the realm of miniatures gaming, this chiefly took the form of appreciating the role of Napoleonics in the foundations of modern miniatures wargaming and even role-playing games. I always felt...well, almost a duty to "get into" Napoleonics as part of my overall self-designed curriculum.

That was over 25 years ago now. I won't get into the multitudinous reasons why I never quite managed to meet that goal, why Napoleonics consistently eluded me. I'll only say that a chance bit of browsing the Internet a few weeks ago led me to what I believe is a final homecoming to this most tricky of niches.

So why does this mean I'm back on my bullshit, you ask?

Well, like most hobbyists, I've done the whole "no new miniatures" pledge. Or rather, no new projects without clearing space from my collection first. For example, my Fantasy Warriors project was made possible by clearing out my Armies of Arcana and WarmaHordes collections.

But this dip into Napoleonics constitutes a whole new project. So how do I justify it? Well, you see, it's a very, very small project...

Those are blocks of 2mm scale units moving across a (mostly) flat acrylic battlefield. The whole concept comes courtesy of Forward March Studios, from where I snatched the photos above and below and who I now have to thank for giving me an entry point to Napoleonics after all these years.

See, the 3-D printed minis offered by Forward March are suuuuper cheap, which addresses one of the chief problems with the genre. And the figure scale practically dictates a grand-tactical approach (for which I have selected the intriguing Et Sans Résultat rules to drive the table action), nicely doing away with the at-times fiddly tendencies of period rulesets and focusing on what makes the era so arresting: massive armies moving in great columns and lines across a war-torn landscape.

Best of all, all the component pieces (save the plastic "board") fit into a little tackle box!

So, you see, I get to cheat a bit, as this is something perhaps a bit closer to a kriegspiel-style "operations room" wargame than a traditional miniatures game. Hell, I'm even tempted to pick up a couple croupier's sticks to move the units around! (I'm only half-joking...)

I'm also happy that this is a project that doesn't represent much commitment in terms of painting time. Those 2mm blocks paint up real fast, or so I'm given to understand, and terrain is pretty much accounted for. At this point, I'm mostly just waiting for the ESR rulebook and my 3-D printed strips and buildings to arrive in the mail and I can conceivably have a game up and running within a few days—quite a refreshing change from the extremely slow burn of all my other projects!

(Speaking of those, I should have some stuff to post soon. Gen Con prep and various writing commitments slowed me down a bit this summer, but I've been steadily plugging away on my 40K and DBA projects, and I just need to make time to take some photos so I can post about them.)

Once I get in a game of my micro-scale Napoleonics, I'll be sure to post about the experience here!

Goblin War Giant

The Grenadier Goblin War Giant weighs about 3.5 pounds (nearly 1.6 kg).

I mention this because there seems to be a direct correlation between the figure's weight and the time it took to paint it. Or maybe that was just me.

I can say that handling over three pounds of nearly-solid lead makes painting more than a little awkward at times. This definitely isn't the sort of thing you can just pop onto a holder and thoughtfully rotate a couple inches from your nose as you daub on paint!

Nevertheless, after about six weeks of on-and-off painting in the evenings, I finally got this sucker done.

All my Fantasy Warriors figures are getting my "old school" basing treatment: green paint, topped with simple flocking.

I decided while painting this guy that my gobbos' skin tones will match those given in the old AD&D Monster Manual for that extra throwback flavor. 

I'm immensely proud of how this turned out. Not only does it look great (if I do say so myself), but it's a real blast from my gaming past—oh how I drooled over the full-page ads for this bad boy in my old Dragon magazine ads back in the day! And now it's mine...all mine!! Muhahahaha!

Next up: switching gears to work on some ancients for DBA...but in a vernacular I've never painted before. Stay tuned!

A Return to Fantasy Warriors (and Some Musings on Miniatures Pricing)

In my last post I teased a bit about acquiring the legendary Nick Lund "Goblin War Giant" sculpt. Although recasts are available through Mirliton, I managed to find an original on eBay for only slightly more than the cost of the recast, so now I have the old box too! I have fond memories of drooling over the ads for this guy in Dragon magazine back in the day, and it's kind of wild to finally have it in my collection.

And yes, fond memories are at the root of this particular project.

Now, my love for Fantasy Warriors was what got this blog started waaaaay back in the day, but unlike then I am now a man in his 40s, and I am biologically compelled to get all weepy and nostalgic for lost glory days of old and such.


In all seriousness though, the classic look of Grenadier and Ral Partha instantly transports me to a time when tabletop gaming was brand new and terrifically exciting to me, and it's both useful and rewarding to be able to access those memories 30 years hence. Although I enjoy gaming on different levels—dare I say better levels—than I did then, I do miss that sense of unbridled curiosity and fascination that came with delving into a rich and rewarding hobby, and collecting old miniatures brings back a touch of that numinous experience.

Plus the figures are just damn cool.

So after much deliberation, I've decided to part ways with my Warmachine/Hordes collection as well as my Armies of Arcana collection. This frees up four shelves in my cabinets and gives me the capital to fund the putting together of four Fantasy Warriors armies (Humans, Amazons, Goblins, and Undead, plus selected allied commands like our Dwarfy friends up there).

Getting rid of my W/H collection was an easy decision; you can read all about my frustrations with the edition change-over in my last post on the topic, but honestly WarmaHordes and I never quite gelled. It's a bit like the 4e D&D of the miniatures hobby—it does its thing very well, but pretty much every single design decision went against what I look for in my gaming experience.

And best of all, the minis are all going to My Esteemed Opponent, so I know they'll have a good home!

Selling my beloved Armies of Arcana Amazons and Undead was a harder decision, but the reasons behind purchasing them many years ago no longer even remotely apply (long story, another topic for a future post perhaps), and the money goes to a good cause. Besides, I'll still have an Amazon and Undead army, just...different.

Once I settled on this plan, my thoughts turned to how to go about collecting. My usual approach (as it is for most hobbyists) is to sit down and work up a "master list" of what I want to get, and then start putting in orders, either all at once or in stages (depending on how hard the list is going to hit the ol' pocketbook). I wanted this experience to be different.

Back in the day, my miniatures collections grew organically. I didn't have anything near the means to afford to buy even a portion of an army at once, instead collecting in dribs and drabs. This was also the days before online shopping, when I was mostly dependent on what my local game store sold. This availability forced me to build my army in ways I might not have otherwise. (I never did get that unit of halfling archers for my Empire army...)

My intention is to follow this pattern to some extent via eBay. As much as possible, I am using what's available on eBay as a guide to what units will be in my army. For example, I picked up a blister pack of two Amazon Sabertooth Cat Riders, so that means I'll have a unit of those. I can fill in the gaps with orders of recast figures from Mirliton, as well as supplemental orders from Ral Partha, Alternative Armies, and even Hasslefree (since they scale well with old-school sculpts). I also have some pre-conceived ideas of which units are "must haves" (like the Dwarven War Cannon) and which I'm going to totally avoid (I want my Undead army to be wholly infantry, for example—it just seems more "Army of Darkness"-esque that way).

Over the past two or three weeks I've been quietly purchasing figures off eBay and I just put in a big order for my first "wave" of supplementary figures from Mirliton and Alternative Armies, so I should be seeing the first proper units taking shape for my various armies soon.

At that point, I'm going to start painting. I won't be ordering any other "waves" until I have this one painted, though I'll continue to troll eBay for more seed figures for future units.

Before I go, a quick and wholly unoriginal observation. Take a look at the photo below:

I was lucky enough to find an original box of the Dwarven War Cannon still in shrink wrap for a very reasonable price. And just look at that original price tag: $8.95! That is wild.

One of the reasons I wanted this particular set so desperately is because I actually owned it back in the day. I have vivid memories of picking it up during a trip to Wargames West in Albuquerque in 1991. Even with the meager allowance I was earning as a 13 year old, clearly $8.95 was well within my means.

Plugging $8.95 in 1991 money into an inflation calculator yields a price today of $16.35. Outside of Reaper Bones, you simply could not find a model of that size and "battlefield value" for that kind of price today. It makes me wonder whether it's even possible for today's youth to get into the wargaming hobby in the same way I did.

Of course, Grenadier ended up going out of business within a few years of releasing this set, so maybe their pricing wasn't terribly realistic even for those times...