"Skirmish Games, Larger Figures?" Topic

Do you prefer larger figures when skirmish gaming?

Yes!

About 5 years ago I started collecting 15mm for skirmish games. I wish I had actually played a few games before I spent as much as I did (foot locker full of terrain and miniatures). The players could not identify the weapons or equipment on the miniatures. It lead to all kinds of confusion picking up miniatures and holding them close to their eyes while squinting. A 15mm miniature looks good in your hand now stand back three feet…

15MM scifi is all going on eBay soon!

I have now switched over to 28mm. Vehicles however are just scatter terrain, transport or scenario objectives in this scale. I find I am spending more on terrain than I am on miniatures.

Only use 28mm figures for everything so is that "yes" or "no"?

It's a bit of a pain to skirmish in 6mm but my group has played many a skirmish game with 10mm individually based figures with over 100 figures on 4x4 gridded table.

I prefer 20mm figs or larger for skirmish. Now I mostly have 28s but any new project will be 40mm or 54mm.

I prefer larger figures on larger tables but since skirmish gaming is generally very scenery heavy and most of my gaming requires me to take both figures and scenery to the club I have been moving to smaller scales as the quality of the figures has improved.

My game room is on the third floor. I can barely carry my 15s and terrain up and down. 25s would kill me.

I can see 15mm or smaller for large battles and 25mm for medium battles and skirmishing. Scenery already on hand for the 25mm is one reason, but also being able to make the same table useful for more realistic ranges is another. The scale can become for one-to-one not only in figures but in distance.

No

Absolutely. 6mm for large historic battles and tank heavy ones, 10-15mm for medium size and space restricted battles and 28mm or bigger for skirmish so that you can identify individual figures.

Yes – 54mm mostly, bit of 42mm and I suppose the 30mm tends to be sort of skirmishing…

Skirmish in 6mm and 30mm SF though I am leaning toward higher tactical levels for the 6mm. Old West in 54mm. WWII in 30mm

I do prefer 28mm figures for my skirmish games so yes. I use either 6mm or 10mm for my non-skirmish games.

28mm all the way. Anything smaller and you can't tell one weapon from another.

I used to do 1:1 scale skirmishing called Re-enactment

I like to skirmish with 28mm, I find it fiddly with smaller scales.

I use 28mm for skirmish gaming. I seriously considered switching to 40MM for some periods but then I realized even if I did buy/make the 40mm scale terrain to go along with it I would have no place to store it!

Not anymore. If I ever game again it will all be one scale (15mm). I'm not going to have double terrain anymore.

Dan

I wanted to do napoleonic skirmish in 15mm bout I really got sucked in by plastic 28mm kits. Ya just can't see a sharpe or Harper fig at 15mm. My old D&d 28mm figs remain the standard for that genre, so I sort have gone backwards when I started collecting fantasy 15mm to play bbdba with my ancients.

Unless you go to something more like a boardgame, figures no more than 6 times their groundscale height look OK. Beyond that it is too much distortion for me. So figure size dictates the groundscale which in turn dictates what sort of game you can plausibly have, before it becomes a boardgame with figures.

Yes, 25/28mm. Nothing so sad as to watch a single base skirmish game with 15mm figures.

Rallynow. Not sure I would say that. 15mm is still big enough to get at the pieces with typical war-games set ups. We fight platoon infantry actions with 10mm but normally they are part of a wider battle and the houses have to be based to stop them moving in relation to each other.
I have seen folk do skirmish with 6mm but getting hold of the figures in narrow roads I guess can be challenging. To be honest over 1/72 it is more about the models than the game. 28mm stuff just takes up so much game space it crimps the action or is so distorted that it looks a bit daft. I guess its each to their own.

Like other games, for me scale selection is mostly driven by nominal range – the range at which we expect the majority of the engagement to happen. Secondarily, the size of the force you want to field.