First Game of BOFA

That's Battle of Five Armies if you are confused. The titular battle was the climax in the Hobbit book (and no doubt the upcoming film), pitching an alliance of elves, dwarfs and men against goblins and wolves. In my case, it was more an Encounter Between Three and a Half Armies, since the goblins or elves are not yet painted.

We set up a village to be defended by men, with dwarfs coming to their rescue from the nearby hills. Rushing in to pillage were the wolves and wolf riders. The game plays very much like Blitzkrieg Commander, hardly surprising as both games are based on Warmaster. BOFA seemed very fast moving, there are few stats to get bogged down with, and I'm sure the rules will come fairly quickly after a couple of sessions. I could remember most of Command, Shooting and even Combat, it was just the rules on Confusion that (wait for it) caused some confusion.

Pitching an all cavalry force against a pure infantry force was probably unwise, the goblins rampaged through the enemy in no time at all, but it gave us a reasonable idea of how the game plays and it seems promising. I am keen to get some more tiny figures painted, perhaps some goblin infantry to make the opposing forces a little more balanced. Time to break out the tiny brushes and giant magnifier!

Coincidentally, there's a teaser trailer up on the GW website today, the totally expected release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Strategy Battle Game. I am guessing it will be similar to the previous 25mm incarnations of Lord of the Rings, skirmish level gaming recreating scenes from the book/film. We will find out later in the week.

Men and Dwarfs

 Here's the latest batch of 10mm stands for the Battle of Five Armies game. These are the plastic dwarfs and men that are included in the box set. Now that I have this lot painted, I can try out a few games against the goblin wolf riders and wargs that I painted a couple of weeks ago.

The men are inhabitants of Esgaroth, the town built on the lake in The Hobbit. I wanted them to be fairly rustic in colours, these are hunters and fishermen rather than fully trained soldiers. Even so, the spear armed troops get unified shields, it's easier to identify them on the battlefield. The banner is a house or castle on waves, to symbolise Lake Town.

The dwarfs I painted in my usual earthy dwarf palette - muted greens, reds and browns. Their flags are a stylised axe and what is supposed to be a dragon, though up close it's more like a rabbit! Luckily, at 10mm these are flaws only I can see. The three dwarfs on the left are Thorin and his companions.

And the next big thing is......

......not that big at all. Around 10mm to be precise.

Recently I have been keen to take up smaller than 28mm wargaming. My interest was sparked by the rather excellent looking figures of Dropzone Commander, but sadly the start up costs of even a modest pair of armies was beyond my reach. Putting aside that disappointment, I started to look around at other ways to game at small scale (and hopefully small cost).

Warmaster is probably the best known game that can be played at 10mm scale. From my research on the web, it seems to be very highly regarded and has spawned a number of other rulesets, but I have never actually played it myself. I have played Blitzkrieg Commander, one of the spin-offs, and it was my enjoyment of this game which really switched me on to the premise of small scale gaming. But then the question arises, which scale to go for?

Infantry at 6mm are not much more than tiny pegs and detail is really hard to distinguish. Vehicles are just about recognisable, though it can be hard to differentiate a panzer III from a panzer IV when they are both smaller than a fingernail. At 15mm figures are much more detailed and easy to recognise, but it can be difficult to play grand battles, unless you happen to have a ten foot long gaming area available. To my mind, 10mm is a good compromise scale for epic sized battles, offering figures that are just about large enough to have a good level of detail so they are easy to recognise, but small enough to allow masses of them to be used in the standard gaming area of a 6 x 4 table.

The obvious thing to do was to invest in Warmaster. It's consistently available on ebay, at reasonable cost too. There are figures representing the more familiar Warhammer armies like the Empire, High Elves, Orcs and Goblins and the other usual suspects, with even some rarities such as Kislev troops, though these are more expensive. But then, I already have several Warhammer armies and some of them seem to have grown to epic proportions already.

So how about Warmaster Ancients, or Historical, or the new kid on the block, Hail Ceasar? These games can be played at various scales, from 6mm up to 28mm, so any one of them would be suitable. Again, scouring ebay showed that there is a regular trickle of 10mm armies for various historical period, from ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, right up to Napoleonics, with pretty much every other era in between covered by one manufacturer at least. Historical gaming at 10mm is certainly a potential option at some stage. But like so many of my wargaming choices, my ultimate decision came about by accident.

The Battle of Five Armies boxed set was released by GW back in 2004, as part of the mass of Lord of the Rings merchandise. It was one of many, many releases at the height of the Tolkien movie mania, but it never really received much support. I know I dismissed it as a gimmick at the time, but when a copy came up for sale on a forum recently I snapped it up. The box contains a couple of starter forces, with reinforcements in the shape of metal blisters. I think I have at least one of everything that was released, which gives me a couple of decent sized starter armies. All for around the cost of a marine battleforce!

The figures below are part of the boxed set, Wargs and Wolf Riders from the evil army. Fighting on the good side are dwarfs, elves and men, with a few special guests such as Beorn, Gandalf and the eagles. As you can see in the picture, the plastic figures are small but well detailed. I have speed painted them by airbrushing a base coat, then a wash followed by picking out the odd detail. The aim is to get them painted quickly and make it easy to identify what the pieces represent. The effect comes from the mass of troops together, not from the painting of individual models.

Lumme, I shrunk the figs!

Does anybody say "lumme" these days? I think it was a word used in the 1960s and 1970s British sitcoms, and was a staple of kids' comics when I was a youngster. It was the best I could come up with for a play on "Honey I Shrunk the Kids". Enough waffling, the subject of this post is teeny tiny soldiers.

Here's a handy chart to deftly explain the different scales most miniatures conform to. The left hand of the scale is the one most of us are familiar with, Warhammer figures (and most of the well known miniatures games) are nominally 28mm but probably nearer to 30mm. The Lord of the Rings figures are 25mm. Flames of War figures are 15mm scale. At the far right of the scale is 6mm scale, as far as I know this is exclusively the domain of some historical figures, think mass regiments to recreate the battle of Waterloo, that type of thing.

So what about 10mm? Which games can you play at this scale? Why would you want to? It's probably easier to answer the question with another picture. This is a John Blanche diagram from a Tolkien book, showing the Battle of Five Armies from The Hobbit (coming this winter to a cinema near you). There are thousands of figures involved. Imagine trying to recreate this in 25mm scale, you could spend a lifetime painting the figures and need a 20ft board to fit it on!

At 10mm scale battles like this are much more achievable. A standard 6x4 table will be ample space, and armies of thousands can be represented by groups of stands that each occupy a footprint of about 40x20mm. GW's warmaster is a fantasy 10mm game, while historical players have a few rulesets to choose from. Sci-fi players have less choice, there's Epic 40,000 and the newcomer to the block, Dropzone Commander. 

In terms of minis available, there are quite a few manufacturers selling 10mm historical figures, though frustratingly their websites can be a bit coy about providing images. Presumably this suggests that the quality is not that good, why else would you not advertise your wares on your own website? GW still sell some Warmaster figures, though they tend to be much cheaper on ebay. 

It's surprising to me that 10mm is not more prominent in gaming. There are plenty of rulesets that specifically support the scale, while any ruleset can theoretically be adpated with a little work from the gamer.There are many manufacturers, even if you do have to hunt around for some of their images. Despite these obstacles, this is a scale I intend to explore in the near future, with a starter set winging it's way through the postal system in the next few days.