Are Miniatures Necessary?
No, not at all. Any of the games can be played with cardboard counters. In fact, the GDW rule book above adapts their miniatures rules to use of small printed cardboard counters they had published. But in some ways, this puts the cart before the horse. Most people play miniatures wargames because they like miniatures. The wargame lends some degree of purpose to hording miniatures. Still, miniatures are not necessary. Examples of miniatures games without miniatures abound such as the SPI game T-34 and the Avalon Hill game Jutland. Even games designed for miniatures like Harpoon and Napoleon’s Battles include cardboard counters as substitutes for figures. In a real sense, the miniature simply decorates whatever base it is sitting on.
But look at the package below. At one point, SPI, one of the most enterprising proponents of games with cardboard counters sold boxes of Napoleonic miniatures to mount on the cardboard counters in two of their games. Miniatures may not be necessary but they are often welcome.
Questions of Scale
Why so many scales? It seems that manufacturers could never quite decide which scale was best. For a time, 20mm which meshed well with Airfix figures and HO buildings and accessories seemed to dominate. 25mm was introduced during the 1960s purportedly through Hinchliffe Miniatures. Other manufacturers quickly followed and for a time, this was the dominant scale. In the book Wargames in Miniature by Joseph Morchauser, he refers to the ‘tiny 20s’ as if they were the smallest scale available while not mentioning 25mm at all. S. Craig Taylor suggests in one rule book that the only ACW figures then available in 15mm were made by Jack Scruby who listed them as 9mm but notes that more 15mm figures would be on their way from a host of manufacturers. He was certainly right.
In the 70s, there was a drift towards smaller figures with the introduction of 12mm and 15mm figures. 15mm soon became a dominant scale. It makes perfect sense since the growing sophistication of gamers led them to games involving hundreds of figures and any reduction in size meant a reduction in cost, a reduction in weight, and a reduction in prep time. The figures also look good with HO scale buildings made for model railroad builders. Since that time, figure size has tended to drift upward with various manufacturers producing 28mm figures and 18mm figures. Perhaps it the because the average gamer’s age has increased and their eyesight decreased. 20mm figures have once again emerged since they blend so well with commercial 1/72 equipment and buildings while 6mm metal and 54mm plastic figures continue to attract an audience. 30mm seems to be an odd man out.
For those who wonder about scale, some compelling observations from Tom Meier:
“The origin of two of the main small scales of the 70’s and 80’s (25mm and 15mm) is an interesting tale in the vagaries of business. In the first days of wargaming 30mm was the dominant small scale. This was the size of a range of plastic figures from Germany and early metal manufacturers made their figures compatible to it. The hobby didn’t really start to take off until the 1960’s when advances in spin-casting equipment made it possible to produce figures at a much lower cost. Several English companies were at the forefront of this expansion and managed to dominate the hobby by sheer variety of product. They made figures in 25mm as they called it though it was really more like 26mm or 1/65 scale. Later for mass wargaming they introduced 15mm, once again more like 16mm or 1/110. These scales had always struck me as odd. When you make a model to sit on the shelf it doesn’t really matter what scale it is but when you are using models in conjunction with other models as in gaming or model railroading, consistency is more than a little humbug. It seemed to me it would have made much more sense to make wargaming figures in 1/76, railroad OO scale, in which there was, and still is, a plethora of plastic figures to supplement and allow for easier, cheaper entry to the hobby. For mass gaming railroad HO or 1/87 is the most popular scale with lots of buildings and other useful auxiliary products for the figure gamer. I finally got to ask the man responsible for the introduction of these scales about them when I traveled to England on business. He was an old-time designer who worked in solder and was curious about the new epoxies but could never get the hang of them. I asked him why he had chosen to introduce new incompatible scales rather than match existing ones and be of more service to the hobbyist. He put his finger beside his nose and said confidentially, “that’s where we were clever, you see. By making our stuff incompatible they’d have to buy everything from us!”.
“I was flabbergasted. Well, I thought, just because you’re clever one way it doesn’t stop you from being stupid in others. I pointed out to him that his company didn’t make everything a gamer needed and further that as soon as his company started to succeed outer companies and new companies had made figures to match his so that the only real, lasting effect of his ‘cleverness’ was to inconvenience his customers. Oh well, if the world were a logical place it’s men who’d be riding sidesaddle.” [From Sculptor’s Confidential, a Miniature Underbelly… by Tom Meier.]