Last summer, I took part in a demonstration/nostalgia game with 30mm. castings at Historicon. Never again. Oh, I'll play in conventions again, but the terror of leaving my beloved castings, or worse still castings I'd borrowed, alone with strangers was worse than standing in the path of the Chevalier Garde. Still, if we're to recruit, historical miniatures players have to demonstrate the One True Way to the young fantasy, science fiction and computer gaming crowds. The big selling point of historical miniatures is appearance and 3 -dimensionality. Recruiting younger gainers means - shudder - letting kids handle your stuff. This means using stuff than can be dropped, stepped on or just plain go AWOL without the senior wargamer going ballistic. I meditated deeply on this and have concluded that the solution is new CHEAP armies. Right now, I'm working on a number of solutions, which I'd like to share. Solution One: Comic Books and Spencer-Smith Remember those old ads on the backs of comic books for American Revolution figures? The earliest ones were hard plastic flats. I tried to track some down, but eventually concluded that they were too expensive and fragile for my purposes. Nor was the set-up time of slotted bases a selling point. Those I'd painted went off to a wargamer who played with flats, and I went back to the drawing board. Last summer I found the flats' successor: 25/30mm soft plastics. not great castings, but available dirt cheap in a flea market. (A toy soldier dealer tells me they mostly move at about $2 a set) I'd avoided soft plastics since childhood, but some MWAN correspondents had reported good results, and with an extensive army for sale for $7, 1 decided to risk time on the experiment. An old wargaming friend and middle school teacher had mentioned using wargaming as a teaching aid, so here was my chance to contribute to the hobby without .actually having a horde of screaming kids around. The comic book figures included about six poses of tricome infantry, officers, buglers and drummers, Indians, some excessively ugly guns, gunners who appear to be using their sponges for quaterstaves, and generic light dragoons shorn of any ornament on their helmets. Works of art they werent. On the other hand, they had all the strictly necessary components for an AWI army. I avoided anything the least confusing about the uniforms, and color-coded the troops: continentals in dark blue coats with militia and light dragoons in brown, and all gun carriages light blue. British in red with provincials and the cavalry of the British Legion in dark green, and Hessians in dark blue but with mitres. I painted up about 600 and passed them on to my friend. He tells me that they are holding up under 8th graders. As regards painting soft plastics, I can only echo advice already given in MWAN: wash with detergent and dry, prime and paint with acrylics, and seal with a flexible clear matte coat. Properly treated, they will hold up even under the "care" of schoolchildren. All are mounted on scrap matte board from a craft shop. The scrap is so cheap as to be virtually free. About the time the comic book army went into action, I found an address for Spenser Smith figures and picked up a few hundred for $50, increasing my infantry and adding grenadiers and light infantry. The next Historicon, I was picking up yet more Spenser Smiths out of someone's scrap box. This time I walked off with about 300 for $15, and added mounted officers and his more detailed British and American light infantry. The more detailed castings scale well, but are a bit more brittle. Overall, the Spenser Smiths are slightly larger and better detailed, but they'll work with the comic book figures to produce a very nice cheap AWI army. For buildings, I went back to Toys R Us and found a 54mm Wild West kit with badly underscale vinyl log cabins and three-rail fences. The cabins work well with the AWI 30mm plastics, and the three-rail fences pass, cut down to two rails. The remaining bits are in a zip lock salad bag, about to be donated to the Salvation Army. No waste. Trees are golf tees spray painted dark brown and glued upside-down on card bases and 1.5" or 2" diameter green acrylic pomporns. Gluing the pompom to the "trunk" gives more variety of size and shape than one would expect. Remember, especially in smaller scales, you're not painting a soldier, you're painting an army; not making a tree, but a forest; and not a house but a town. Mass effect covers a multitude of sins, but you have to have the mass. Bridges are a pair of vacuformed plastics - Bellona, perhaps? - purchased at a flea market in an intact and a destroyed version. For ground cover, streams, hills, and roads, I use the cheapest and most portable end of my regular terrain: a plain green cloth with roads of tan felt and rivers of blue sheet foam. The cloth is hard to damage or steal, and the roads and rivers for a 4' by 6' board are well under $10 in a craft shop. I keep both in three widths to accommodate different scales and basing, and different sizes of stream or river. The idle or finicky wargamer may wish to add ruts to the felt, but I've seen hard-packed dirt roads from elevations. Ten felt works as well as most commercial products, and sticks to the ground better than almost any. Hills are slabs of foam rubber painted to match the Geo-Hex green. They lack the flexibility of real Geo-Hex hills, but they're light, cheap, portable, and damn near indestructible. So there you have it: an army of close to 1,000 30mm castings for something under $100 for figures and $50 for terrain. An army of pure Spenser Smiths is a little more, and an army of the old comic book figures somewhat less, but a little more difficult to track down. And next time I bring an army to a convention, I'll be calm, cooled and collected. Well maybe... Solution Two: 1/72 Plastics At the end of Part One, I had virtuously sent off a cheap plastic army to recruit newcomers without getting my own lungs in an uproar. Part two opens with the local gaming group, which has virtually abandoned historical miniatures, appealing for historical miniature games for their fall convention. Well, maybe... but I'm still not risking good lead. Back to the recruiting stations to raise more cheap armies! Encouraged by the larger figures, I went on to the 1/72 plastics which are the old Airfix figures and their modern successors. Cheap and relatively consistent in scale, the real problem is that the variety of poses means buying many boxes from the same manufacturer to sort out into credible units. Word of advice: if you find infantry of a type you can use, start by buying four boxes. They're easier to get than their larger buddies, and better detailed, but they are smaller and the better detail cries out for more painting time. Basically, by comparison with common metal scales, there are few armies available where one can build balanced forces of both sides with plastics and without conversions. The good news is that those armies cover a very large number of wargame periods. Availability is improving, and the scale compatibility problem is much less severe than in 15 or 25mm metal. I'll discuss what's available in another article, but the key to the solution is not to be too detailed. Rules that specify "horse, foot and guns" work out. Rules where you need Old and Young Guard Horse Artillery are an invitation to many happy evenings with adhesives, knives and solder irons. Don't start down that road unless you really enjoy that sort of thing. Roads, hills and streams are as solution One. The alternative trees are the pine trees out of Christmas displays, bought cheap in January, soaked in water to remove the "snow" and seal them with matte spray. Now you've got a tough indestructible tree, but it can take years of after Christmas sales to make a relatively cheap forest. The golf tee and pompom technique used in solution one still works, but the greater detail of the casting shows up the primitive nature of the tree. Spray adhesive and flock can be used to good effect. Money? Well, these are the expensive end of cheap castings. A box of 32-50 infantry, 2-4 guns, or 12-16 cavalry runs $3.50 - $8.00 each. So an army of 240 infantry, 48 cavalry and 6 guns will average about $75. Think it over the next time you pay that much for a battalion. Solution Three: Risk and Miniature Warfare The current Risk sets each contain several hundred hard plastic figures in what look like late Napoleonic French shakos. A lot of nations wore something similar through the 1830's. They're about 10mm scale, though the guns look a bit awkward. Mine are painted up as a vaguely Anglo-Hanoverian force in red with skirmishers in rifle green and a pseudo-Austrian Imperial force in white with skirmishers in Tyrolean gray. Guns are the common gray (British) and ochre (Austrian). I mount them on my usual 3/32" balsa stands, using V x 1.5" for the formed troops and 1/2" x V for the skirmishers. Four cavalry, 10 infantry, or two skirmishers or guns per stand, grassed with Woodland Scenics T-49. The paint jobs are pretty simple. Flat black primer, a damp brush of white, coat color, trousers color, flesh, musket & barrel, facings and a minimum of accoutrement. If you haven't worked in the smaller scales before, one 10mm casting is a bit small. Ten to a stand is not bad, and a battalion of 40 is visible and fairly credible. I've got rules based one stand elimination, and the rules themselves are no more than a page or two, so they can be handed out to each gamer and read before hostilities. As before, a commercial mat and foam slab hills - somewhat thinner foam this time blended with felt roads and blue foam waterways. For forests, I first tried bumpy chenille trees: a little underscale but workable, cheap and almost unkillable. Still, they were a little small. Next effort was roofing nails, glued to cardboard and spray-primed black or brown. I picked up three sizes from 7/8" to 1.5". Then I glued V diameter green acrylic pompoms from a craft shop to them with wood glue. I cut the cardboard into oblong bases, grassed them with T-49 and sprayed the result with a clear matte. Overall, the trees cost about $0.05 each for materials, and I can turn out about 100 in an evening watching television. My built-up area is the quiet market town of Milton Bradley - Monopoly houses sprayed flat white with dull red roofs to suggest tile, and doors, windows and half-timbering done with a black marking pen. Mounted on card with green scrubbing pads for hedges and green pompoms for shrubbery, they're quite credible. For demonstration use, something sturdier may be in order, and I'm starting to lay in a supply of square, rectangular and triangular shapes of wood for a future period of urbanization. Remember, especially in smaller scales, you're not painting a soldier, you're painting an army; not making a tree, but a forest, and not a house but a town. mass effect covers a multitude of sins, but you have to have the mass. Bridges are still a problem - well, not really, in that there are plenty of fine and relatively inexpensive commercial micro-scale and 10mm bridges available, but I'm open to a cheap substitute. I may someday buy some metal command figures, but to field a total of about 1,500 plastics with terrain will cost about $150. Not too bad.  Back to MWAN #108 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com