Tabletop Minions Budget Video Challenge

[RSDean]

Last week’s Tabletop Minions Friday video was a discussion about getting started in wargaming on a limited budget ($100US, in this case):



I took this as a challenge, and started actually buying the stuff to do this.  Whether I can hold to the plan long enough to get everything painted and an actual game on the table is a different question…

It is implied that we want to do this with actual painted 3d miniatures.

I would be interested in what other approaches people would use.  I won’t list mine out yet, so as not to prejudice any answers.

[has.been]

1) Peruse e-bay for the cheapest figures. A bonus if they are painted (even badly)
    as that would reduce my expenditure.
2) Buy a cheap set of acrylic paints (currently using a set from Poundland.
    Buy a few nice brushes. The Works often discount these, e.g. 3 for £1.50
3) Look on the Internet for Free sets of rules, or write a simple set myself.
4) make scenery from oddments. Charity shops are great for this.
    e.g. Broken toys & ornaments. If you are doing Sci-Fi almost anything is
    of use. I made two Star wars type moisture traps out of some broken Robot
    weapons. Cost = almost nothing.
5) Make the play mat out of cheap material. Once again charity shops. I have
    two very nice grass green cloths that were curtains.

I should be able to stay in budget IF I am not too fussy over things like:-
what period, scale, rules set etc.
I am going to play.

[Belgian]

Depends on the desired quality of miniatures and so much more.

Should I be on a budget, you can grab an old Risk boardgame. Those come with plenty of miniatures and dice. Then you seek a free ruleset for that era and you can start. Think they can be found for between 5-10 euro. For 5 dice and 360 miniatures (infantry, cavalry, artillery) Plus a campaign map of the world. Think I even played that way on pool table, 20 years ago and great fun it was too.

[armchairgeneral]

Wouldn’t something like the Perrys Travel Battle do the job? With the addition of a cheap paint set to paint it if you wanted?

https://www.perry-miniatures.com/product/bb-2-travelbattle/

[RSDean]

Wouldn’t something like the Perrys Travel Battle do the job? With the addition of a cheap paint set to paint it if you wanted?

https://www.perry-miniatures.com/product/bb-2-travelbattle/

Travel Battle would pretty much do the job in England. At 50 pounds there’d be money for paint and brushes; in the US it’s 99.95, so nothing left for paint…☹️

[RSDean]

Depends on the desired quality of miniatures and so much more.

Should I be on a budget, you can grab an old Risk boardgame. Those come with plenty of miniatures and dice. Then you seek a free ruleset for that era and you can start. Think they can be found for between 5-10 euro. For 5 dice and 360 miniatures (infantry, cavalry, artillery) Plus a campaign map of the world. Think I even played that way on pool table, 20 years ago and great fun it was too.

We actually did a budget challenge and presented it at a convention in 2003.  There was one Risk-based Napoleonics game; it seems like a solid idea.

[RSDean]

I have written up my approach to this on my blog: https://sharpbrush.blogspot.com/2023/07/6mm-games-and-new-172-challenge.html

The short version is that I am going to try to paint an Italeri Medieval Tournament set (in 1/72 plastic) and play a game using Nordic Weasel’s Knyghte, Pyke and Sworde rules.  The base set has about 50 foot figures and 20 mounted, and KPS calls for small warbands topping out around 30 or so.

[Dolnikan]

As RSDean mentioned, those sets of 1/72 soldiers make for perfect miniatures if you want to keep things affordable so there should be more than enough money for things like paint. Bases can easily be made from cardboard which is essentially free and you can buy a huge army for less than half the total budget. Scenery depends on the era but with some cheap paint you can easily make some hills and the like from random pieces of crap you have around. On a 28mm scale I also built a whole bunch of houses from corrugated cardboard and coffee stirrers, so that also shouldn't be too expensive.

[Hobgoblin]

As RSDean mentioned, those sets of 1/72 soldiers make for perfect miniatures if you want to keep things affordable so there should be more than enough money for things like paint.

Yes - and there are plenty of 1/72 boxes that will give you an entire DBA/HOTT army for about £9. You could also get a long way with many games (Impetus, Fantastic Battles, etc.) if you used 1/72 figures on 15mm base sizes rather than 28mm ones. And there are plenty of cheap or free rules for all types of game.

Or you could buy some peg dolls and MDF bases and create wooden armies:

[RSDean]

My son is the particular DBA in 1/72 specialist.  I’ll ask him as well, but which DBA armies can you do with single boxes?  There are only a few boxes that include both horse and foot, so Vikings/Saxons perhaps as an example?

[Kaiphranos]

I have been summoned!

I think it would be feasible to build a DBA army out of a single box of 1/72 scale figures, with a couple of caveats. As mentioned, manufacturers tend to sell cavalry and infantry separately, and cavalry sets are often too small to supply 12 elements' worth of troops (24-36 mounted figures). So you would likely be looking at an all-infantry army, or one of the rare exceptions where you get multiple troop types in the same box. For DBA specifically, you might not be able build out all the options given in the army list, or you might have to fudge things slightly - skirmishers/psiloi armed with bows instead of javelins for example.

There's also the question of opponents - if we instead aim to build two armies from two boxes, our options might open up a little for periods like Medieval Europe or samurai-era Japan, where everyone has similar equipment, and you could get, say, one box of mounted knights and one box of infantry and split that into two armies.

Some specific armies that ought to be doable:

• Sumerians could be built from the HaT infantry set, or you could get a set of the chariots as well and have two matched armies.
• Some versions of the Nubians, Libyans, and Sea Peoples could all be built out of a single box of the appropriate Caesar set. Unfortunately, their best historical opponent, the Egyptians, would really need both infantry and chariots.
• At one point HaT put out a couple of combined-arms sets that might have been intended specifically for DBA: there's a Theban Army and a Gothic Army.
• Besides the Thebans, there are a lot of other sets of Greek hoplites, and the associated DBA army lists tend to be pretty monotypical - if you pick your army and your box carefully, I expect some of them would work.
• Over in the New World, a box of the Caesar Maya has enough figures for a DBA army - get two boxes and they can be their own worst enemy.

Of course, with a lot of sets out of production, and a lot of the 1/72 scale manufacturers basedin Russia or Ukraine, finding the set you want may not be as easy as it was a few years ago. 

[Hobgoblin]

Yes, Emhar Vikings and Saxons give you way more than a full DBA army each - infantry only, in line with some of the DBA Viking/Saxon lists. But the Saxon box would certainly give you a mix of blades, shooters and spears (or hordes) in HOTT terms while the Viking one would give you a mix of blades, warband and shooters. And of course, you could make heroes out of the others. HOTT's certainly the cheaper and more versatile option for assembling both historical and fantasy armies because the heroes, magicians and clerics reduce the figure count!

This Italieri box of knights could give you something like this:

1 x shooters (two crossbowmen and spearman leader)
1 x spears
6 x blades
2 x knights
2 x hero
1 x paladin
(so 32 out of 24AP with options - or you could go with 3 x knights, all the infantry and use the spare footman as a hero)

This Accurate box gives you 9 x blades, 2 x knights and two foot individual options (cleric and hero, perhaps), so more than enough.

The two Italieri 100 Years War boxes (French and English) give you quite a bit of variety (blades, shooters, spears, clerics, paladins, heroes and riders in the case of the English). And the Zvezda 100YW English box gives you 14AP of shooters, 8AP of spears/blades and 6AP of blades/warband, along with a nice hero set-up (or another unit of blades).

Caesar Orcs II gives you 20AP of warband and shooters, along with 16AP of heroes and magicians. You could do something similar with Caesar ratmen, lizardmen and elves.

There are loads more. Armies of high-quality infantry (all blades, all warband or all spears) are easy to find, but there are plenty of mixed boxes. For horde or cavalry-dominant armies, you might have to increase the budget by a second box.

You could make a terrific HOTT army out of the Caesar Three Kingdoms box, which offers spears, blades, shooters, behemoths or heroes, and magicians.

[Hobgoblin]

• At one point HaT put out a couple of combined-arms sets that might have been intended specifically for DBA: there's a Theban Army and a Gothic Army.

Oops - posted just seconds after you! Yes, that HaT Theban example is a great one. It's worth mentioning, too, that HaT boxes tend to be very cheap (at least here in the UK), so buying two of the smaller boxes instead of one from Italieri/Caesar/whatever wouldn't harm the budget too much. And that widens your options massively. The HaT El Cid sets are excellent, with very large and cheap infantry boxes, and both infantry and cavalry could be swapped between opposing sides to a large extent.

[RSDean]

I would note that it should be considered a given that choosing a relatively uncommon scale should be considered a commitment to having both sides available. I hadn’t thought through to HOTT, but that would be a clever way of reducing model count and we are very familiar with it. (Kaiphranos is my elder son, if that wasn’t clear from context. )

I started painting the Italeri HYW figures (pictures when a little further along), and a couple of budget-minded friends have already suggested acrylic craft paints would be more frugal than hobby paints. I am finding the hobby paints with the dubious brushes a little frustrating, having gotten used to better brushes, so perhaps I should also experiment with craft paint and good brushes and see if that is easier.

[Hobgoblin]

Yes, that's true on the scale - although we sometimes play Kings of War with 1/72, 28mm and 30mm all on the same table, and no one really notices (it helps that the humans are all 1/72, so the monsters are just bigger and more brutal-looking).

But yes: for a beginning wargamer, it definitely makes sense to build two armies together.

I can't imagine craft paints being much fun with 1/72 - I'd have thought that the greater translucency would be a bit of a problem with such fiddly figures!

An advantage of HOTT over DBA is that you can rope in kids' toys (stolen from the toybox or picked up second hand) to serve as behemoths, dragons and gods!