The Siren Call of Addiction

I don’t know if this is a common phenomenon, but it seems to me that the hobby/addiction of collecting and gaming with miniatures has this “parallel infection” effect.

What I mean is that when you first start the hobby, you usually have a very clear idea of the type of miniatures and set of rules you’re going to collect and play. For many people like me, it’s Warhammer 40K. Then the more you get into the hobby, the lines between different miniatures and rules tend to “blur” somewhat and before you know it, you’ve started collecting other ranges too.

Let me elaborate by example.

Half a year ago, 40K was essentially representative of the whole “miniature gaming” hobby to me. I knew that there were some other “miniature games” like Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Lord of The Rings, AT-43 and such, but that was about the scope of my knowledge.

Up till this point, I had assumed that each range of miniatures are uniquely associated with a particular “game”. Maybe this was only natural, given my limited scope of exposure to miniature wargames. I mean, you can’t really use a Wood Elf Spell-slinger from Warhammer Fantasy Battles in a Lord of The Rings game, or use a Space Marine in AT-43.

For these games, the miniatures are intrinsicly a part of the games themselves, as they represent the background and the “raison d’être” of each game. I guess a close analogy would be chess and checkers, since you can’t use the pieces from one game for another.

Coming back to the subject, the important thing is that these other games (WHFB, AT-43, etc) had no attraction whatsoever to me.

Then, for some unknown reason, I suddenly became interested in WW2 miniature wargaming.
I’ve always had a particular fascination for historical battles, and love PC games such as Hearts of Iron, Civilization, and the Total War series. So I guess it didn’t take much for some sublimal trigger to shift my interest from fantastical to historical wargaming.

This naturally led me to Flames of War, the most prominent and popular miniature wargame featuring WW2 battles. But more research into FoW showed that many historical wargamers consider the FoW rules too “unrealistic”, and too much catered to appeal to Warhammer players. So I looked for the rules that these people considered “realistic enough”, and ended up with a big list that included “NUTS!”, “Disposable Heroes & Coffin For Seven Brothers”, and “I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum”.

Then it hit me: In Historical Wargaming, the same set of miniatures can be used for different rule sets!

This was something of a revelation to me.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense.

A U.S paratrooper in World War Two simply can’t be represented by anything other than a figure of a U.S paratrooper (unless, of course, you’re going for the abstract NATO symbols). Different rule sets may determine how far he can move or shoot in a given turn, but he will always look the same.

The best thing with having all this wide variety of rules is that different rules have a different area of focus, allowing you to choose one that suits your idea of fun and pseudo-realism.

For example, “NUTS!” (by Two Hour Wargames) focuses on the actions and reactions of each individual soldier, giving a very RPG-like feel to the game. However, this pretty much restricts the scope of conflicts to squad-level, or platoon-level at most before becoming unwieldy.

On the other hand, rule sets like “I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum” (by Too Fat Lardies) focuses on company-level conflicts, but that means there will be less emphatic connection with individual soldiers.

So, with such a colorful variety of rule sets to choose from, one would think that I’d be settling down with WW2 miniature wargaming for the forseeable future.

But unfortunately, that was not to be so.

Now I’m feeling a very strong attraction to miniature wargaming in the Ancients/Medieval era, with quite a bit of interest in Napoleonics. I believe that I’ll most likely end up with miniatures from all eras.

Looks like I’m not only addicted to a particular miniature wargame, but to miniature wargaming in general.

Let’s see if I can infect my friends and colleagues with this contagion…