For two and a half years, I ran the Volci Campaign as a play by mail game. One thing I noticed was that my players wanted to field the largest armies they could. From previous experience, I knew how to keep from needing more figures than I had in a campaign battle. First, it starts with how you organize the campaign. It is important to limit the number of troops a player can raise for his army. You can give each player an army of limited size and that's all he gets for the operation. That way, you can determine army size by what you and your friends have in your collections. In a multi-player campaign, you can limit players to what they have painted in their collection. I've also seen players take hoards of unpainted orcs and tell you that for the battle, they are Prussian Grenadier Guards. Now, that's an easy solution to the miniature shortage problem. Another idea is to have each section of the campaign map or battlefield or wargame table able to hold so many points worth or number of troops. Then, if by chance a player has too many troops on the table, penalties apply due to lack of supply, unhealthy conditions, and other conditions due to the land's inability to support them. Another idea is to have two oversized armies divided so that each figure represents 2X, 3X, 4X or more times the number of men each figure represents. That idea is from Tony Bath's book SETTING UP A WARGAMES CAMPAIGN. Then you could do something else that I did. You can paint 30,000 miniatures! Back to MWAN #118 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2002 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