"Easy boardgames to mini game conversion" Topic

Hi all-

I was messing around with the first chit game I've played in… a decade?… the other day, and I had a sudden thought.

Say you have a chit based game that you liked. Wouldn't it be quite easy to port it over to a mini game by:

1) printing off a clear plastic sheet with a hex grid printed on it, with all the ranges and information placed onto the grid, with the hex in the middle being the "activated unit hex" from where everything will be measured. Make the hexes a bit bigger than they would be on a normal map, maybe 40mm across, or something like that. Spacious so you can deal with stacking issues.

2) basing up some smaller scale figs (10mm, 6mm, 3mm, 2mm) on, say 1" or 20mm squares

3) when figuring out combat and movement on an otherwise normal terrain board, you hold the clear hex grid over top of the unit you want to activate (the "activated unit hex"). Then you move it according to the rules in the chit-based game.

I'm thinking about trying this with my 3mm figures, because it would make movement and command a lot easier (me thinks).

Has anyone ever tried this out? Seems like it would work pretty well.

I'm thinking the old Avalon Hill board game, Gettysburg, was pretty much this. They had advanced rules similar to this.

That does sound pretty cool. Should work fine.

In the 90's

I used to teach new players how to play Empire by using Wellingtons Victory.

Meaning I used the rules for Empire…and used the map and counters…

Each hex on the map was a known distance…too easy…Wellingtons Victory could be used with any set of miniature wargame rules

Are chits standard size?
.5 inch?
I have an idea for a side project….

I think you'd rapidly find using a separate hex overlay to be a pain. I play a lot of gridded games and it is much easier to just pick up some base cloths and mark them up in squares, hexes or offset squares.

A lot of board games have an excessively detailed grid though, and it can work better to get rid of ZOC and use superhexes instead (seven hexes represented as one). Depends on he specific game of course and how much you want to rewrite the rules. I did pretty fair impression of VGs Hills Highway by converting clumps into hexes into areas and bumping the unit scale up a level so I could play the entire Arnhem campaign in an evening using figures.

MartinRapier- do you have a picture of that?
I dont know if you've seen my blog, but I draw a map on cloth with chalk and use 3mm figs, so I can definitely capture the scale of most chit-games.

My idea is roughly to use 40mm sabot bases and place my 20mm x 10mm bases on them (20 x 3mm infantry or 6x cav), along with a stack of chits. It seems like it would work well with brigade level games. The 40mm sabot would be the chit, and represent 350 meters of space or something. Stacking would be done with chits (which would be piled up on the sabot along with the minis). This would resolve the bug-bear of stacking in miniature-wargames that call for single-base brigades. You could stack an entire division in the space of a deployed brigade- impossible in miniature games but common historically.

There was a two part article on this subject in issues 404 and 405 of Miniature Wargames.

John "Dog in the fight" Treadaway

John Treadway- thanks, I''ll definitely be checking that out.

I made a hex mat very easily IF you mark the centers and not every intersection. Works a treat and looks great. My map was with 5" hexes and took maybe 20 minutes.

You might consider looking at Commands and Colors. They use cardboard hexes. You could buy up sets of hexes off Ebay etc. Then you just build the map with the hexes.

Also, Lost Battalion games sells packs of interlocking (puzzle style) printed terrain hexes.

We did it with Squad Leader many years ago, just changed hexes to inches.

Close Assault and Fire Power were both easy conversations

I did hexes (4" across) by making a hex grid from here:
link

I printed it at Staples as a blueprint. I got a cheap poster frame, placed the clear plastic across the top, and drew dots at the corners. Then I drilled the corners, and used that as a template. I typically mark all the corners, then freehand mark a dot between each two hex corners that make a side.

I've used it on a cloth (green sharpie dots are visible but don't look too distracting), and I've over-hexed my Geo-Hex with the same 4" pattern.

I wish it was easier to get a link to a picture in Google Photos. But here's a link to a picture.
goo.gl/photos/2usC66Adn2BG74TQ7

andy

Much like Major Mike, I converted Sniper! and Patrol! by changing hexes to inches.

Glenn,

I turned Panzer Blitz into a floor game…the tile on the floor looked just like city blocks…and we fought at division level in a city ;-)

Art

Panzerblitz and Third Reich.

Two extremes in scale but I have seen both done with miniatures.

GMT's Simple Great Battles of History

Last year, my son and I played out the ACW using "Grand Army of the Republic" from Task Force Games. The game is akin to the Axis and Allies system with area movement. There is enough detail to give a framework for generating meaningful battles.
For the battlefields, we randomly generated terrain, and for the armies, transferred the strengths from the map to correspond with the miniature forces. We added in any number of rules that we felt helped make the conversion work. For example, the winner of a battle would have a higher casualty return than the loser.
The game includes commanders, production and has an important naval component.
We had a blast with it. Played it twice over several months; it provided as intended.