Is there an inexpensive, good miniatures game out there?

Games
1

As may be seen in Everything Else and my questions on basic painting, I’ve painted a couple of minis and kind of have the bug.

I was all set up to order Island of Blood (the Warhammer Fantasy introduction box). But I just realized that I probably shouldn’t pull the trigger.

My understanding with the Warhammer stuff is that for Fantasy and Sci-Fi, you’re talking hundreds of dollars just to have a half-way credible side. Given that I want to play with my family and would end up buying the opposing force as well, this essentially means I’d be spending $500+ on a game (plus the other obvious costs for paints, terrain, etc.).

I don’t think I can do this.

Is there anything out there that is more reasonable, yet still has a good, solid ruleset and setting?

I’m not incredibly concerned about a particular setting (though I would prefer sci-fi or magic fantasy).

I find myself growing more frugal over the years by choice, but I’m not super cheap here. I’m not expecting to field a couple of 1,000 mini armies for $50 or something. I’m also not planning on buying $200 at once before I even know whether I like the game.

So I can handle shelling out say $200 or so over time (plus more for the paints and brushes), but I can’t justify twice that or even thousands of dollars for a family game.

Is there anything out there that might scratch the itch?

P.S. I might consider something like Necromunda or Mordheim, but would prefer something more traditional and less squad tactical.

2

Back in my day (warhammer wise, I’m not that old) you could pick up entire armies on eBay for about $200 and it was relatively easy to remove the paint and repaint as you wanted, it does remove the modelling aspect though.

You can also buy “army” sets with a reasonable number of miniatures for ~$50 (I’m Irish so dollar estimate might be off or they could be more expensive now). As far as I know GW has moved to almost entirely plastic miniatures recently and therefore shouldn’t be very expensive at all. I can’t imagine a 1,000 point army setting you back more then $150 or so, and they also have extensive rulesets/scenarios for low point games (400pt 40k and 500pt Fantasy).

Mordheim and Necromunda are only available these days through mail order, afaik, but would still be considerably cheaper then a full “Main Game” army. Rulebooks for these games should be free on the web aswell, iirc GW moved everything to pdf when they stopped supporting them. If you like modelling aswell as painting there are also a lot more opportunities for converting and specialising your own miniatures (because you have to deal with so few). It also lessens the effect of the dreaded painter fatigue, when you look out onto like 80+ models you need to paint :)

3

I’m glad I was right about Necromunda/Mordhiem and other specialist games. GW hasn’t turned completely into the devil since I left so ;)

Mordhiem here and 'Munda here.

Inquisitor might be worth looking into aswell, if you purely want to paint and model rather then play (I would imagine it’s basically impossible to find Inquisitor games these days).

4

I think I have a pretty good qualification to comment as I just in the last couple months got into Warhammer 40k. Some of this should be applicable to the fantasy version as well. There’s a few factors that influence how much you’re going to have to spend on an army:

  1. Which faction you want to play. In my opinion, Orks are one of the best factions for cost-effectiveness for a couple reasons. They’re in the Assault on Black Reach starter set (along with Marines) which is one of the best values on price-per-figure that GW publishes. A lot of folks will buy a set to get the figures for one of the factions and then eBay the other guys for dirt cheap (more on eBay later). Also, you can scratch-build just about anything to count as an Ork vehicle (convert old RC cars, GI Joe vehicles, or just build it out of pieces of sprue) and it doesn’t break believability. There’s not much of a way to home-build an Eldar hovertank due to the uniformity and sleek design of their stuff, but any random pile of garbage with four-ish wheels can be an Ork trukk.

  2. How much you want to tinker with army lists. It won’t take too terribly many purchases to field a 1000 point army, but unless you know exactly what you want to use before you buy any of it, you’ll need to make purchases here and there to experiment with alternate loadouts. That, or you can proxy damn near anything as long as you’ve got the right size bases and an opponent who’ll indulge you.

  3. How willing you are to spend time on eBay. There are some pretty phenomenal deals on eBay from time to time, and if you’re patient (and a bit lucky) you can scrounge up significant amounts of kit for dirt cheap. Between a couple of eBay auctions and a split Black Reach set I was able to field a 1500pt Ork army for around $160. I hadn’t used eBay more than a dozen times before I started WH40K, but I discovered that the skills I picked up playing the auction house in WoW are quite useful on eBay as well.

5

Go with necromunda. Every family member can have their own gang that the personalize over time. Great fun.

6

if you buy the d&d minis by the case they aren’t terrible cost wise. but they are plastic and prepainted, not sure if that is a turnoff for you.

i’ve had some good times with d&d minis matches.

7

Necromunda is an awesome, awesome game :)

I’ve heard from some that Mordhiem is even better but haven’t actually had the chance to play that myself. It remains the only GW game I haven’t played (barring like 2 really old specialist ones that I can’t even remember).

8

Cheap and good?

The best Fantasy rules out there is Hordes of the Things.

A secondary good choice would be anything from Ganesha games.
http://www.lulu.com/songofblades

A third good choice would be Two Hour Wargames (although these are a step up in complexity)
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/twohourwargames/index.html

Of course you cannot get much cheaper than free and here are hundreds of rulesets to choose from
http://www.freewargamesrules.co.uk/whats-new.php

Finally… real wargamers write their own 8)

9

Chess?

10

Legos and some imagination.

11

You can paint lego?

I didn’t even know there were chess sets that you could assemble and paint yourself…

Do people bother to read the OP anymore before they try to be funny.

12

I can’t think of any particular reason why you couldn’t.

13

I’m surprised that Warmachine / Hordes has not been mentioned. It’s much cheaper to get into than GW game and works much better at smaller scales as well. It’s a game that has nearly as interesting tactical play at the 15 point level as it does at the 50 point level (which represents probably a $35-$150 investment level). If you’re talking about having a variety of armies that could be played at the family level, the starter battlegroup boxes are perfectly playable and can be found on ebay for $32.50 + shipping. If you like it from there, naturally you can expand for larger or more varied forces. By comparison, getting into warhammer at the smallest scale is probably looking at two unit boxes and a commander model which will run around $100. The thing is, even though there are fewer models in those Warmachine staters, the dynamics of the gameplay are far more tactical and interesting. If you want to spend a bit more and add, say, another infantry unit and another big beast or warjack you’ve upped yourself to about $100 total spent per side on warmachine and you have enough for a very reasonable sized game.

14

A 1500p 40K army will cost you roughly 500$US. A selection of paints & enough brushes & stuff to paint up two 1500p armies, without them ending up all the same colours, will cost you another 150-200$. With a good airbrush (cheap ones aren’t worth it), it’ll be twice that.

I know you said you’re after a wargame, but you might want to consider starting with an RPG and not cross over into wargames until you’ve had a chance to accumulate a pile of stuff.

A tabletop RPG doesn’t have to involve people making a grand display of why no acting school in the world would ever have them. Pretty much any RPG can play like Space Hulk, if that’s what you want.

If I was trying to gear up for 40K, I’d do it by downloading a copy of the old Warhammer Quest books, and buying the Rogue Trader sourcebook (the Dark Heresy one, not the 1ed 40K rules)

There’s basically 5 obstacles to wargaming: the tools (paints included), the table, the terrain, the armies & the narrative.

Easing into a wargame by starting with the RPG version of it is pretty much the perfect way to do it. It’s how I, and I think most 40K players my age, got into 40K way back when. Because the original 40K rulebook was basically an RPG rulebook, just slanted very heavily towards players with large retinues of henchmen & having the battles play out on the tabletop.

Without actually having read it, the Rogue Trader RPG rulebook will let you do the exact same thing. But as I haven’t read it I’m also suggesting you get a hold of a scan of the old WHQ sourcebooks, because those I have read, and they contain the best “narrative creation that don’t involve actual role playing or a lot of strain on the GM” tools I’ve seen, easily adapted to whatever setting.

Which is exactly what you want if the point of starting with the RPG version of your wargame, is an excuse to get the tools you need & build the table, the terrain, and to start collecting the minis.

That said, there’s several ways to do the same. For example, you pick up a copy of Lost Patrol and tabletop’ify it: buy the 5 SM Scouts you need, 20’ish Hormagaunts for the lurkers, and build up each of the little cardboard hexes as proper 6x6" areas of LOS-breaking, difficult terrain for your eventual games of 40K.

It’s even easier if you go for Fantasy Battle instead of 40K. Unlike Necromunda, Mordheim is solid base on which to build a couple of WFB armies, and you can even build up to Mordheim by starting with FFG’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

15

The stuff people are suggesting for smaller scale stuff, it’s all good.

Regarding 40k/Warhammer… well, there’s a “thing” which lies beneath the army-points mechanic. Units have two sorts of costs - the cost of the unit in-game and the cost of them in real life. You really have to balance them both.

On average? I aim to spend about 100 quid for 1000 points on a non-horde army. What I’m not doing is buying optimum choices, but choices which fit my actual money-based budget. I got my 1000 points of Necron for that 100 quid. It really is do-able. It’s just something you have to bear in mind.

I’m actually collecting Skaven now*, which is a ludicrous horde army. Even so, I pretty much kept to the 100-quid/1000 points thing because I bought 85 clanrats off Ebay for twenty quid.

Of course, it also helps that painting the army is the major part of the reward for me at the moment. I don’t know anyone else with an army.

That said, I’m tempted to throw down for the Island of Blood kit, paint up the elves as a small army and play 500 points games. With myself, probably.

KG

*I use a lot of brown.

16

So sad. :(

17

I used to love Necromunda. I also like Battlefleet Gothic, which I think went out of print. Basically warhammer with Space ships but you didn’t have HUGE sides.

About the time I got out of playing these games, I had my eye on Gorka Morka - did that survive? It looked like Mad Max gangs made up of warhammer factions.

18

Necromunda & BFG are, if not thriving then at least not dead. Both still get new mini releases & updates every so often. Sort of like Blood Bowl.

GorkaMorka is pretty dead, I’m afraid. It seems it never took off, really. Except perhaps for Ork players trying to find cheap’ish minis (says the guy who bought GorkaMorka 5 boxes on sale once).
I doubt it’s hard to track down if you’re really interested. But you should be warned that GorkaMorka uses what’s basically 40K 2ed v1.1 rules, and as I’m sure others will confirm, the 2ed 40K rules were just dire.
If you have a GM willing to run your games and do some major playability-surgery on the rules, then it can be a great game. One of the people I play wargames with is such guy, and though we play maybe 6 games on a good year, it’s hugely enjoyable.

19

I second the Warmachine/Hordes recommendation as well. You can spend as much as Warhammer/40K if you want, but I found that it was much easier to find small games and that the small games were more satisfying with Warmachine/Hordes.

I would also add that there is a newer company called Mantic Games which is made up of old GW people and sells some really nice minis for pretty cheap. They follow pretty closely the GW factions so far (high elves, undead, dwarves) and most of them would fit in just fine in a GW army. They also have their own rules set which is much simpler than Warhammer. Right now you can pick up a starter set which has undead and dwarves for like $60. I think there are over 100 nice plastic minis (30 sprues) in the box. There is a decent review here: http://www.totalwargamer.co.uk/blog/?p=878.

I have a set on order so when it arrives I would be happy to post some pictures as well.

Any unpainted miniatures game is going to be a significant time and money sink if you really get into it but if you like the hobby then I think it’s a decent way to spend that time and money.

20

I absolutely adore Mordheim. It’s probably my favorite of the Games Workshop games. Strong theme, strong rule set, strong miniature lines.

I bought so much terrain that we’d lay up these huge battlegrounds across a an entire kitchen table and just go for hours.