According to Wikipedia, “Miniature wargaming is a form of wargaming that incorporates miniature figures and modeled terrain as the main components of play.”

I am, personally, a fan of Warhammer 40K which has a ‘gothic space fantasy setting’.

While I’ve played a sum total of 3 games, I have a large army that I’ve been pretending to work on for about 6 years.  Now don’t let that scare you. Yes, if you buy a box of this stuff your going to get a box of tiny plastic heads, arms, legs, wheels, chassis, tank turrets, etc, and yes you are going to have to put them together (unless you cheat and buy a fully assembled/painted army from EBay – but that would just be wrong!), but there are endless opportunities to modify and personalize your army.  It can be anything you want it to be.

To my credit, I managed to get 1 piece done – The Chaos Marine’s Defiler.  Granted, I believe this is the biggest piece offered by Games Workshop – and in my opinion the coolest.  I mean it’s a giant metal spider, with a skull on it! How cool is that? It took me 2 days – a total of 24 hours. I was really rather pleased with how it turned out… and then I couldn’t even look at the smaller units.  Since then I’ve done a little bit on my guys – but not a whole lot.  I keep telling myself I need to do it…

But my favorite thing about this game is the scenery – the terrain. My first experiment was really for a game called MageKnight and involved turning AOL cds and Styrofoam into craters… it was so easy! And fun! And I think they turned out really realistic looking! From that point on I was hooked. I would go to Lowes to wander the aisles re-imagining all the bits into space age/alien/techno goodness. I would go to TerraGenesis to drool over other people’s projects.  It’s amazing what some Styrofoam, play sand, Elmer’s glue, and some acrylic drink stirrers can turn into.  And now LED lights are coming into play!

It’s literally limitless what you can do – and who says you have to limit it to War games? Why can’t it be sculpture? Or an interesting piece of wall art? Hmmm?

Here is one of my earlier experiments. This is made with tennis balls on foam core covered in a white glue/wall filler paste – it reminds me of the scenery from Alien. This is one piece of a set of 3… the other two smaller pieces have wandered off along with my CD craters…