Geekcentric Guide to Miniature Wargaming: Building on a Budget

Big Red over at the grand Bell of Lost Souls recently posted an article about How to Build a Collection.  It was good stuff.  And it struck a chord with me as I’ve been considering diving into some additional miniature games and saw my own thought processes and experiences reflected in some of his thinking and wanted to weigh in with some of my own opinions.

Red made some good points about the increase in costs these days for miniature gaming, especially the start up costs.  This can be compounded if, like me, you have a small gaming circle (and are too lazy to go downtown to the FLGS to get a game in) and are usually the one to pick up two armies for each game so you can suck your unsuspecting buddies into it along side you.  And lets face it in general we gamers tend to be horders.  The Pokemon fad was dead on with it’s “Gotta get ‘em all” tag line.  We suffer from that mentality more often than not.  And while mini wargaming can allow for a better investment of your money seeing as it’s a hobby as well as a game, we all only have so much disposable income these days, and increasingly less at times it would seem.

So how does a jonesin’ mini gamer get his crack attack on?  With some good advanced planning and consideration you can save yourself some Jackson’s and maybe even a Benjamin if you’re lucky.  Big Red proposed three ideas for how to build your collections and I want to expand those ideas a bit:

1) Smaller List Focused Armies – With this approach Red mentions you basically math hammer things, pick your theory list, and pray you didn’t make a mistake (or allow for list boredom to overwhelm you).  While you could do this for a competitive build, I find this is the best method for putting together a themed list without letting your model count to get out of control.  I took this approach with both my Orks and my Imperial Guard builds.  I found units and models I liked, a fluff that intersected, and settled on a point count and build size.

For instance, my Orks are built around the idea of random results.  Basically there are no units involved that don’t have some kind of random elements requiring rolls or the like involved.  Now of course that’s about as smart as flipping a page and simply pointing at it to pick your units if you’re looking to win a bunch of games.  Now if you’re looking for some laughs and fun, then yeah, it’s going to be lots of those.  So armed with a few miscellaneous list builds, you’re able to narrow down your units and then go hunting for some deals.  The biggest thing to keep in mind when it comes to a new game, is for this to be a successful build, and for you to not fall sway to the call of shiny new things, you’ll need a good hold of the core game rules as well as your faction or army’s rules.

2) Large Cross-Codex Collections – Ahh, Big Red, how we share an adamant admiration for alliteration.  So with a LCCC, Red tells us you’re looking for one army that can be played with multiple codecies.  This is accomplished with some distant sect, splinter cell, or far removed chapter.

When I was building my foundation for my Space Marine (which is perhaps the easiest of armies to make this work with, though others work well with some creative thought) I decided on this approach to prevent me from painting tons of the same core unit’s different colors just to match a specific marine codex.  This actually gave me the idea to build my IG army the way I am so it fits together with a theme.

What I did was take a Marine chapter I liked, the Raven Guard, and searched their history to find a story where my goals for IG and Marines could meet happily.  The advantage of the 40K universe is there are hundreds of successor chapters that allow for your own DIY chapters, and here was born my Blood Guard.  They are a successor of the Raven Guard and fought on Tauros along side the Howling Griffons (another RG successor) and both the Elysian Drop Troops and Death Corps of Krieg (who both are instrumental to my IG build).  So with the Blood Guard chapter I made I’ve built models for every loyal marine codex as well am considering the Chaos codex as a future possibility.  For this to be a successful approach you’ll need to pick a faction or army that can be used appropriately with multiple fluff backgrounds.

3) Large Single Codex Collections – This is basically picking one army and going for it so you can field every possible option in the codex.  I like to call this the “all your eggs in one basket” approach.  Unintentionally this is what happened when I was first building my Raven Guard army that later became the Blood Guard.  I figured adding a few extra units and being able to play all the codecies was a better use of funds and time.  This is where the Pokemon programming takes hold.

When I first started my marine army, as the Raven Guard, I decided it’d be awesome to build an entire company, then that became parts of other companies, and every special character, and so on and so on.  So while this can be an extensive route to take there are some cool things you can do with it.

As a last thought there are a few other places you can look at to save some bucks are eBay, buying a collection off some friends at your gaming club, and forums (though FT\FS threads are harder to find these days on most gaming forums).

So where do you land when you’re approaching building a new army or mini collection?