"Suggestions for game,periods,eras that can be played..." Topic

On a 3x3 table or smaller. This can be 28 mm on down in size, skirmish to larger. Suggest rules, figures, eras, genres, periods, terrain and costs.

I just picked up the Ancients rules…"To The Strongest"
I've had 6mm Macedonians and Persians painted years ago.
Now they are getting their chance and played on a roughly 1.5 ft x 2ft board.

Batman the Miniatures Game is another one that goes in a small table.
Joep

Well DBA for ancients and it's spawn for Renaissance and other periods play on a 3x3.

A lot of the 2 Hour Wargames titles will work on a 3x3 table and that covers a ton of periods from Ancients up to SciFi, Fantasy, Old West etc. etc.

Frankly there are LOADS of choices. What kind of game do you WANT to play?

Old West would be great on that size table. You could build a nice little old west town with a cross road and have it actually look like a part of town.

The number of figures you would need for the actual fighting would be minimal, maybe as few as 3 per side. Heck you can make pretty good old west games with 1 on one side and more on the other.

Then you need to populate it with civilians.

You could probably do it all for $300 USD or less including the cost of the board itself. For rules, everyone has their favourite. I'd probably go with LotOW but I don't like reading rules and know those ones.

Another good option is the game Infinity. Fantastic models, you need two starter sets to have a really good game. The rules are fantastic and free.

You would need a lot of terrain a 3x3 table but again your total cost would probably be less than $300 USD if you used some of the Reaper Shipping containers from their bones line plus some buildings from Micro Art studios or similar.

You'll probably eventually want to get more scatter terrain and some cars just to make things look more realistic which will ad to the cost by and by but to get started for about $100 USD in terrain another $90 USD in figures and then the board.

All pretty affordable, unless you want to go crazy buying more and more armies/forces:

DBA, armies run about 50-80 figures with all options.
DBN for Napoleonic flavour DBx.
X-WIng Miniatures, ~$150 for a decent 2-player set-up.
Blood Bowl, 11–16 figures per team
Ninja All Stars
Battletech Alpha Stirke
Giant Monster Rampage
Airfix Battles
Blitzkrieg Commander (or many other WW2 games in 10mm or smaller will very nicely fit in that space; some in 15mm)

And as the Crispy mouse said, plenty of choices narrowing by period(s) is the easiest start.

There is a book by Neil Tomas called 1 Hour Wargames. He includes 9 (very) short sets of rules for periods from Ancients through to WWII. His games are played on a 3 X 3 and have roughly between 4 and 6 units per side and each unit can have a 4 – 6 inch frontage. You can use any scale of figure.

The rules can be a bit bland if you are used to more detail in your games, but bolting on house rules is very easy. Here is a link to a blog post that I made when I first came across them.

I have included an AAR plus another AAR when I halved everything and played on an 18 x18" board.

LINK link

I play lots of my games on small boards, this size or even smaller. For example:

Ancients – DBA, Neil Thomas' Ancient & Medieval Wargaming, Polemos SPQR (see examples here: link and link and link

As you can see, these are full-sized battles.

Pike and Shot = Neil Thomas' Introduction to Wargaming and Polemos ECW (see here: link and link and link

I think these battles are mainly pitched at a level where many smaller battles of the ECW/War of the 3 Kingdoms could be represented

Horse & Musket – Neil Thomas' Simplicity in Practice from Battlegames 23 payhip.com/b/0awc (see examples here: link and link and Polemos (see here: link )

In my view, these seem to work best for a division-per-side, or a small corps in the Polemos MdE example.

WW2 – I use the old WRG 1925-1950 PDF link for reinforced platoon actions. Examples here: link and link
And I have used Nuts! successfully as well

The vast majority of my games use Baccus 6mm miniatures. On this size of table, each army will normally be 8 – 20 elements strong (the longer the weapon ranges, the fewer the elements).
So for ancients/medieval armies, 12-20 elements for each army. This could cost as little as c.£10 for Numidians: link to c.£40 for Germans link with the other armies coming in between this – armies with lots of light troops using less figures than those with lots of heavy infantry for example).

For pike-and-shot and horse-and-musket games, I tend to go for 8-16 elements. A Baccus army pack costs c.£30 link and for cheapest option, pick a period like the WSS in which figures can be painted up easily for either side, so one army pack can do for both sides and then add to them later.

For WW2, an infantry platoon from Heroics and Ros plus a few vehicles would cost maybe £6.00 GBP-£7 per side? PDF link

I hope that helps

Wings of War/Glory. 1/144 scale WW1 air combat. Ready to play miniatures available. No terrain needed. A few minutes to set-up and take down.

28mm songs of drum and shako ( napoleonic ) is designed to be played on a board around 3x3. You need between about 6 and 10 figures per side. Easy to learn rules and rather fun I have found.

I think having lots of terrain on a small table makes most games work on a small table.

There are very few games which won't work on smaller tables, although in some cases you may have to reduce bases sizes and move distances.

I've done everything from Ancients to Cold War on small tables, and ranging from skirmish, tactical, grand tactical, big battles and even entire wars (OK, it was only the Six Day War, but even so…).

What periods are you interested in, what scale of engagement?

Also:
- Frostgrave
- Mordheim
- Necromunda
- Laserburn

One Hour Wargames covers lot's of periods and if you used 1/72 plastics could be done for about $100.00 USD I would think. Some of the games from Pulp Action Library would work, Battle Troll (vikings) Mad Dogs with Guns (gangsters, use paper buildings) or Outlaws of Sherwood.
link

Crossfire would work in that space also. You would need lot's of terrain.15mm would look best IMHO but 1/72 would work also.

Gloire for Swashbuckling
link
Figures here
link

Many great suggetions above.

One Hour Wargames covers lot's of periods and if you used 1/72 plastics could be done for about $100.00 USD I would think. Some of the games from Pulp Action Library would work, Battle Troll (vikings) Mad Dogs with Guns (gangsters, use paper buildings) or Outlaws of Sherwood.
link

Crossfire would work in that space also. You would need lot's of terrain.15mm would look best IMHO but 1/72 would work also.

Gloire for Swashbuckling
link
Figures here
link

Many great suggetions above.

I should think any of these would cost less than $300.00 USD to get into if you are starting from scratch.

All Two Hour Wargames stuff. They are written for 3x3.

3 X 3 isn't that small- just set your sights a little lower and has others have said maybe reduce figure scale or distances. If a game needs a 6 x 4 table for a 28mm game then it can be done on a half sized table in 15mm (or smaller). I wouldn't exclude anything from a 3 X 3 myself.

Gladiators
Saloon brawls

I have played a lot of games of Saga on a 2x2 board, using 15mm miniatures and halving the ranges. Saga uses fixed range bands (VS, S, M, L) so once you have made measuring sticks at that scale you're set.

Force On Force is great for anything from WW2 to near-future conflicts. The games are (mostly) designed for close-in engagements on small tables. I do FoF in 15mm as well, but keep the measurements as they are in the book.

Pulp Alley is intended for small tables and, being pulp, can be used for basically anything from Egyptian tomb raids to Lost World dinosaur hunting to post-apocalypse (which is the project I'm working on now). I play in 28mm on a 3x3 table usually, but the rules would work fine at any scale.

Those are just the small-table games I have played recently. Basically any game would be playable on a small table, as long as you plan for it with an appropriate miniature scale and you aren't afraid of making some simple adjustments to the measurements.

For 3x3, there are a lot of options.

Of Gods & Mortals is a quite fun option (Along with pretty much everything in the Song of games), Ronin works well if you're into samurai type games,

Kings of War works great in 10mm: use cm instead of in.

I play lots on 2'x2' so 3'x3' would seem like a lot of space! Most rules will work.

I have used 15mm ancients for a lot of the ancient rules (I have tried 27 ancient rules on 2'x2', see this blog post for a link to rules replays:

link

I have also used 20mm WW2 for skirmish and 6mm WW2 with 1 base = 1 squad.

If you have access to the Lead Adventure Forum, there was a discussion 3 years ago on suitable rules for 2'x2':

link

For rules designed for larger scales, I generally find just substituting 1" for 1cm works just fine. The tricky ones would be where base size is really really important to the game and it is potentially hard to scale the bases down.

Good stuff guys. Who says you can't go small and do it all?

And let me add that more & more 3mm scale stuff is being produced by the team at Picoarmor.com.