"Do We Really Need Movement Trays?" Topic

For quite some time,I've been a fan of movement trays. I've bought them & made them & they seem to be a necessity for individually mounted figures. Movement trays are enormously useful. They speed things up, keep units together and make handling large armies much easier.

But here's the question:

Have movement trays actually changed the way we design and play wargames?

Once figures are put onto a tray, the tray becomes the unit.

That can impose formation geometry, make terrain interaction awkward, encourage units to behave like blocks rather than bodies of troops — and sometimes produce formations that look rather unlike anything that existed historically. I've noticed with our Lion Rampant games, they have these rather weird & unnatural blocks moving around- blocks we say we'll take our figures from to fight but usually don't.

And then there are sabot trays, magnetic trays, multiple ranks, skirmish formations…

So perhaps the real question isn't:
"Do you like movement trays?"

It's: Have movement trays changed wargaming itself — and if so, for better or worse?

Brilliant solution or necessary evil?

If your figures are individually based, and you have literally hundreds of them, they're a necessary evil.
Then you wise up and rebase for something like 800 Fighting Englishmen, to impose order on your hundreds of TSATF figures.

I'm rebasing my AWI and FIW figures that I mounted on 3/8" washers. I'm not popping them off bases. I'm instead gluing them, 3 on a base, to 2" x 1-1/2" laser cut bases. Thats the way I've based my Grenzers from the start.
Thats a compromise between washers and movement trays.

Movement trays and their ilk are a gateway to diorama-style formation basing:

- Individual bases = Freedom and Liberty
- Movement trays – Greater Manchester
- Mass basing – Communism/Marxism

Personally I don't like to see them at all. I game in 15mm and there are usually very few single figures. OK, some are used as markers. I guess if I games in 28mm and there were a lot of single figures I may feel different.

Never used them at home even for big battles

I'm not thrilled by them, but if you use individual casting removal, or otherwise have large numbers of individually-mounted castings, they're hard to avoid. Put a few hundred 28mm horse & musket figures on a table and try to play a game without them.

Put a few hundred 28mm horse & musket figures on a table and try to play a game without them.

I have -- multiple times… It was painful to do, it was painful to watch.

I play pseudo-medieval fantasy mass battles where every attacking figure gets one Attack Die rolled for it -- bucket-o-dice games. That means that every Player is trying to mass as many troops in the combat as possible for the greatest chance of winning each attack. We tend to play large games, so there are hundreds (minimum) of figures deployed onto the tabletop. They are organized into Units which must stay close together as a group, or their Morale plummets and they become virtually useless until they regroup.

With hundreds of figures in play on a large table surface, movement trays speed up movement considerably, until the owning Player expands them into a combat line to maximize the assault and mayhem.

In short, they are useful in speeding up movement of hundreds of figures in large organized combat units on the tabletop. I have no issues with them, I rather like the advantages they provide. Mine tend to be rectangles of MDF board, painted green: simple, fast/easy to make, and highly effective and useful within the game. Cheers!