"Wargaming with Legos?" Topic

"What?! Legos!?!? Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff Scoff… ad infinitum."

Yeah, I know. But seriously, I wonder if this is done? Legos are fairly versatile. Of course, they LOOK like Legos, but that would be the point.

IIRC, somebody once did an Ogre game in Legos.

It is being done. There are some blogs on the topic, but I don't know the address. To each their own. I war-game with plastic army men. ;-) It's all good. Cheers!

Ah, here it is? (No, this is not Sean Connery in the red Zardoz suit. That will be supplied only on request).

tinyurl.com/bah7u

It seems like this might work very well for OGRE minis, especially if you also used lego terrain, as the rules explicitly state that thew board does not represent the battlefield, but a holographic representation of it.

Maybe the lego set-up represents a more primitive software package?

Love those Ogres – very nice.

Why to people refer to the toy as 'Legos' though? Surely it's just Lego.

The brand name is, I guess, lego, but the individual blocks, in plural, are "legos."

Would people who game with Duplos be ancients gamers?

I thought about building scifi vehicles out of legos. I always wanted to do Arctic Fox in miniature. I even considered building Space Hulk type scenery out of legos for the interior of an arctic base or an alien mother ship. I was going to run it like an X-COM adventure. My kids have tons of legos they will not miss.

Does any one have any links on the subject?

There's a few sites that have awesome little lego battle tech type of machines. I think I lost the links though

Here is a mod to make the game of Battlestations into 3D. The company already offered pewter minis, and I thought the game deserved to have some "thickness", if only for the added looks. I mentioned the ideas to the authors, and they seemed interested in my concepts. One version had LEGO(tm) brick walls, and I've also played with cardstock and plastic scratch-built stuff as well.

picture

picture

picture

picture

picture

picture

non-LEGO- but hey, it's still plastic!
picture

@Alan Saunders- The company likes folks to say LEGO bricks (never lego or legos) in order to protect their trademark.

We played Monster Island using Bionicle (LEGO).

Legos were how I got into war gaming in the first place. Back in the dark days of middle school my freinds and I were too poor to afford "proper" models, so we would play the first edition of Mordheim (the one first published in White Dwarf) with Legos. *sighs with nostalgia*

Since starting this thread, I've done a little research.

brikwars.com

I haven't gamed with Lego yet, but I do model railroading with them. Miniatures are usually cheaper than buying Lego figures. I do use Lego for walls and such.

There was a site in the mid 90s called "Lego Wars" with rules on playing simple wargames with Lego men. I downloaded a copy, but they were shut down by Lego for copyright infringement, unfortunately.

For historical gaming I used to use legos for buildings all the time. I have pictures on my site, in my section on "What is Wargaming?" at link about halfway down under the heading 'Setting Up a Gaming Area: "Museum Quality" Terrain is NOT a Necessity!' is a link for a picture of an old game with Panzer IIIs and lego buildings.

If IsNull(DLookup("turt_complete", "tbl_turn_track", "turt_gam_fk = " & Me.txtPK & _
" and turt_sid_fk = " & Me.txtSidePk)) = False Then

Sorry, bad connection, didn't realize I pasted some silly vba…

I think that Lego is the name of the company and the system. If so, saying that you are playing with "Legos" is like saying you are playing with "Games Workshops" or "Warhammers". It sounds wrong to me.

Anyhow, whatever the grammar, if you want to use Lego for wargames, John Wilson's article on the subject in Ragnarok 48 recommends Brik Wars from

link

Steve Flanagan
Ragnarok magazine editor

I think Steve Jackson used to run a pirate wargame at conventions using Lego ships.

How about using lego to make 1/300 scale biuldings for giant monster games? I always thought the best bits of those types of films was where the cities were destroyed by the battling monsters which you could do with the lego blocks! Thinking about it why not use them for Epic as well!

link

I've been using Lego or clones or compeditor brands to build all manner of scenario required buildings for twenty five-odd years now, if you can get over your city being a mix of four basic colours its no big deal.

There are a large number of "plastic building bricks" games. (Yes, Lego is very protective of their trademark.)

Brikwars has been mentioned.

I like Mechaton for fast and silly "giant clunky robot tank" gaming. lumpley.com/games/mecha.html

I even wrote my own rules for the Megabloks Dragons sets: link

I occasionally still get download alerts on this, which are neat to see, but I only ever got a few bits of feedback on it— all positive first impressions— so I've never known if people have continued to play it. As a result, I've never tried to expand it beyond the original sets to capture the flavor of the new stuff. But it's still available*, and I remain proud of the combat mechanic.

*(Don't worry; I do absolutely nothing with the requested download info. I originally set it up just to track interest and measure demographics, which I've now ceased to do. It wasn't scientific anyway, as anyone could say they were an immortal girl named Bob from Oompaloompaland, and the download would have worked just fine. But assuming most of my responses were legitimate, it was interesting to see the ages and locations of those at least interested enough to give it a look. Mostly I got adults.)

Steve Jackson did run his "Evil Stevie's Lego Pirate Game" at Origins a few years back. It was a lot of fun to play.

Thank you for all the links.

Evil Stevie's Pirate Game can be found here:
io.com/~sj/PirateGame.html

I was privileged to play it with him at BricksWest 2002. It was a blast.

Meiczyslaw had some GW Wave Serpents that he built from LEGO, because we couldn't get our hands on the resin kits. He finally gave up using them in frustration, as everyone else went "Oooooh, LEGO!" when he had a beautifully painted Falcon right next to them that they all ignored.

They were really cool, I must admit. I occasionally wonder if you could take LEGO models to an official GW tournament. After all, they'd all be scratch-built … ^_^

Ah, Derek, that's the rules I was referring to that I thought had been stricken from the internet! Good to see they are still around.

I just played a game with Legos pirate ships using the Warengine rules and it was a blast. It was the first play test, in future games we plan to flush out things like tacking and blocking other ships wind. When I get the rules on the Warengine wiki I'll let you know.

Glad I found this thread. I use Heroscape tiles for my skirmish gaming (modified of course… snow, sand, grass, etc)and always thought the new BSG Mini Mates would be perfect for skirmish games of BSG. The Star Wars ones look great too.

I do like lead figures and resin/dicast vehicles, but am also a sucker for stuff that look more like "toys". Like the Brick Wars stuff.

-B6

Photos from our game table.

picture

picture

picture

picture