Confessions of a Downsizer!

I know, I know, downsizing is a dirty word for most wargamers. Well, dear blog reader, I dun it and survived. And this is my story - you may pick up a few tips!

1/32nd tanks on the lawn - too big?

So to start at the beginning, I am, was, a wargaming megalomaniac! My philosophy when it came to scale was: go for the largest scale you can possibly manage with the space available - otherwise just stick to board games!

Megalomaniac Much?

And I walked the walk - without bragging too much, I have organised Horse and Musket era mega games: Borodino, Waterloo and Gettysburg. These took dozens of players several days to play out with thousands of lovely large 28mm figures. 

Waterloo 200 game - several tables, 3 days, farsands of figures...

Similarly, unfeasibly massive games of Flames of War, Team Yankee, Fate of a Nation and Bolt Action in glorious 15mm, 20mm and even 28mm. Been there, done that, got the T shirt! But did it make me happy?

Kursk in 28mm - don't try this at home!

Well yes actually, very happy and proud and grateful to be indulged by so many wargaming mates! 

But it took a lot of effort and a lot of resources. Mainly space. Without straying into the realms of metaphysics, space is the key. You don't just need a big table to play on, you need space to store your figures, space to marshal your figures. And of course, a friendly local games store with a generous patron who also has lots of space!

Borodino 200th anniversary game at the Hall of Heroes Campbelltown

Twelve years ago I moved from the UK to Australia. And Australia has space. Lots of space. I'm not saying property prices Down Under are cheap, but they are cheaper than southern England. And you get more space for your money - a lot more. I joked that we could have fitted our Dorset 4 bedroom house into the family room of our NSW 4 bedroom house - an exaggeration, but not much of one!

So I got used to having 3 rooms dedicated to my hobby: a gaming room, of course, complete with 10 x 6 foot gaming table that could easily extend to 12'; a store room/painting room; and a library to store all those books which are such a wonderful part of the hobby. 

And access to a workshop with workbench, and a very large garden to spray paint in...

So why the downsize?

Our lovely large house and grounds took a lot of maintenance. Pretty much every Saturday morning was dedicated to gardening or pool maintenance or deck repair or simply just sweeping leaves from all our trees. And we are not getting any younger...

So we made the decision several years ago to invest in a retirement property that would be much smaller, have no deck or pool, and be one story to be able to age in place, wheelchair friendly etc. The plan was we would move there upon retirement in a few years. 

I knew I would then be confined to a single room to store all my books, figures, and wargaming table. With careful storage solutions, I would be able to squeeze an 8 x 4 foot table in there...

Then, just a couple of mad months ago, with local property values skyrocketing, we received, out of the blue, a ridiculously high offer for our house whereby the difference between what we thought our house was worth, and the offer, equated to both our salaries to retirement! Sold! 

The only fly in the ointment is that we had just renewed our tenant's contract, so we are ourselves now renting for a year. In a small, single story property! With barely room for an 8 x 4 table...

My new table - 8 x 4 foot - but so much bigger in 1:144 scale!

So essentially, whilst for a couple of years I had known I had to downsize slowly, the process accelerated madly about a month ago...

Selling the Crown Jewels...

I realised deep down that my large collections of 28mm Napoleonic's and  Bolt Action, and 15mm Flames of War/Team Yankee were now unfeasible. Yes you can just about play with 28mm figures on an 8 x 4' - and I suppose I ought to restrain myself to just two or three armies for one period... But what about storage? 

My storage would essentially be the space under the table. Now that equates to 24 cubic feet - a fair amount of space, to be sure...But, dear reader, I want it all! I want Napoleonic armies - all of them! I want WW2 armies - Russians, Germans, US, Brits, French; and then also for the Cold War!...I want WW2 navies, all of them...

The other issue is terrain and scenery. Which in both 28mm or 15mm scale takes up a lot of space in its own right, if you want to play in NW Europe, the Russian steppes, the Western Desert....

I reluctantly accepted early on to sell off my 28mm Naps and Bolt Action stuff. And, dear reader, I was realistic. Of course I couldn't offer them at prices that reflected the hours spent painting them. And, ideally, I wanted to sell them to locals so that I would have a chance to play with them occasionally...So my formula for pricing was simple - cost price of the figures or boxes themselves, plus the same again for my time in assembling, painting and basing them. 

28mm Calpe Prussians - these were swapped rather than sold...

So a Napoleonic unit of 32 plastic figures sold for $100, a Bolt Action tank the same - double the price of the kit/box. And here's where it got interesting! Napoleonic players? No problem - my entire armies went like hot cakes at those prices, mainly, I'm glad to say, to locals. 

Part of my beloved 15mm British Army of the Rhine - now sold (Sob!)

Then, more recently I took the plunge and also sold off most of my 15mm WW2 and Team Yankee armies - with my meglomaniacal over-reach I was in a position to sell off 2/3rds of each WW2 faction and still have enough to retain for small games! With Team Yankee, however, I sold the lot - for reasons I will explore below. Same price formula - box price doubled for my time to assemble and paint, and most sold off very quickly to satisfied customers...

Just one of the Bolt Action German battlegroups I attempted to sell...

But Bolt Action? Nup! I got slagged off on the various FB market places forums for daring to charge such outrageous prices. One individual, who was upset I had sold models at twice the price he charged, went so far as to get the admins to bar me from a site. More entertainingly, one would-be punter, just seeing the P&P cost, tried to haggle over what he thought was $30 for a 5 unit German battlegroup I was actually asking $300 for - the cheek!

Managed to sell these bad boys locally for a fair price so hopefully one day I'll play with them again...

Having sold about half my collection for this original price, I was left with a conundrum - to sell the remainder at the cost (kit) price that punters seemed to think was appropriate would be unfair to those that I had already sold some to at realistic prices that went a little way to rewarding my 'value add' to the raw kit... In the end most of them went to landfill! Painful, but they were cherished at the time and saw good use and, an inveterate blogger, I have ample photos to remember them by.

In the whole selling process, I avoided Ebay and used FB market place - there are a couple of excellent wargaming market places, in particular the Australian Historical Wargamer Trading Post. Deciding the postage to charge was tricky, as most services seem to charge unpredictably either by weight or volume. Charging postage and packaging at about 10% seemed to work, factoring in cost of packaging.

My top tip would be to ensure you maximise the impact of photos - FB allows you 10 so a couple of overall pics to show the whole army, then focussing in on the individual elements. Particularly with FOW and Team Yankee, what the customer is really paying for is your painting of the infantry figures, so make sure these feature prominently.

A word (or several) about Scale...

Does the figure/tree scale look right to you? A Californian Redwood.

To reiterate, I believe the best scale is the largest one you can get away with! So, moving away from 28mm and cutting back on the 15mm, there are various popular options, most notably 6mm.

6mm Western Desert - Sidi Rezegh

I have played with 6mm WW2 and Modern armour, which offers a more realistic ground scale for Western Desert or Cold War games, particularly given the ranges and speeds of Cold War weapons - hence my resolution to sell off my entire 15mm Team Yankee collection! It also has to be said that the models from some companies are simply things of beauty! GHQ are a stand out here - I simply don't understand how they can achieve such superb sculpting in their 1:285 scale!

6mil 8th Army Infantry

But, well,  6mil guns and infantry figures - meh! 'Nuff said!

10mm is another popular scale, with ample manufacturers of varying quality, non of which sculpts inspires me to paint them - I guess its just a personal thing...but, above all, in the sub 15mm stakes, these scales are clearly not the largest out there - that would be 12mm!

There are lots of things happening in 12mm or 1:144th scale at the moment. Its true that with 3D printing we are all now spoilt for scale, and not really dependent on traditional, mainstream white metal, simulcast or hard plastic manufacturing. 

3D printed Bergmann T-72 in 1/144 - be nice once its painted properly!

So what really clinched this scale for me it for me was Victrix's announcement a couple of years ago that they were launching a comprehensive 1:144 WW2 range in easy build hard plastic. 

And, despite the disruptions of Covid, they are well on the way to delivering, with all you could wish for to cover NW Europe 1944 already available, and Russians on the way. And their infantry sculpts are all you could wish for!

At roughly the same time, I stumbled across Red 3 Miniatures on Facebook, and immediately fell in love with their Arab-Israeli and Cold War ranges. The former in particular is ridiculously comprehensive, down to various engineer figures as well as the more esoteric AVRE type vehicles, sappers in dinghies, you name it.

Israeli Shot Kals by Red3 Miniatures - superb sculpting!

The other recent development on the, very loosely, 12mm/1:144th scale wargaming scene is the introduction of what they describe as 'Epic Scale' horse and musket era figures by Warlord Games. Fair enough, these are strictly more 13-14mm, but close enough for government work - the point is they will fit in with 12mm scenery and look good on a smaller table...My point being, for the wargamer who wants to do it all, 12mm is now getting to be as well catered for as the more traditional larger scales... 

Interestingly, Warlord have chosen to maximise the visual impact of these sculpts, with 20 figures per base, and unit size recommendations of 4-5 bases per unit, each base being 60mm wide by 20mm deep, for a unit frontage of 240mm or wider - frankly, not much saving on width than your average 15 or even 28mm unit, but much shallower.

Warlord Games Epic Waterloo action

Which allows me to stagger back to the original point of this section - scale. Whats the point of downsizing to Epic scale if the width of each unit is the same? Well the answer is in the size of the table I can have. You may remember this is now 8 foot long by 4 foot deep. Dropping from a 10 foot long table to a 8 foot long table is not that much of a game changer - a 20% reduction if I have my sums right. But dropping from 6 foot width, or depth, to 4 foot - a 33% reduction, does seem to have a major impact on my games. Yet the epic bases, at 20mm deep, still allow a units depth to be half that of their larger brethren. And, following the Epic recommendation to halve all Black Powder ranges and distances, in sacrificing 28mm figures for Epic scale figures,  in effect I have gone from a 10 x 6 foot table to a relative 16 x 8 foot table. That's big enough even for me - Big battles in The Grand Manner shall continue!

The wide open spaces of a 12mm game...