Is there an inexpensive, good miniatures game out there?

Games
21

Warmachine/Hordes does have the benefit over 40k of being a fully viable game at smaller army sizes (in terms of points). 40k’s more simplistic ruleset breaks down at that level, although I do love me some Necromunda and I’ve always enjoyed the old Combat Patrol mission types for 40k too.

Personally I’d say Epic 40k, you can get hugely impressive looking armies for Space Marines, Orks, and Chaos for very little money and then look for deals on Ebay for other stuff. It’s also (IMO) GW’s best ruleset, it’s a great game to play and has a fanatical online following with regular development of the rules and army lists.

I guess the big question is who are you planning on playing with? If you need a game that has a pre-existing community and a large chance of finding opponents outside of your usual social circle, then it’s either Games Workshop games or Privateer Press games. Anything else is a gamble.

If it’s just for family play or stuff you’ll introduce friends to, then my vote for an outsider would be Dystopian Wars. I love the look!

22

Adding a vote for Warmachines/Hordes. You’ll drop $30 for the rulebook, another $40 or so for a faction starter set (contains a commander and a selection of figures that makes a legal force right off the bat) and so ~$100ish gets you enough to play if you’re providing both sides. You can even skip the rulebook to begin with as the starter sets come with cut-dwon quickplay rules sheets. Every miniature or box that you buy comes with the unit card so you have all the rules for the figure included. As said it works well at 15points (which will be a Warcaster, 3-4 'Jacks (steampowered battle robots) and maybe a solo or two but also scales up well to bigger games (although still much smaller in scope than say WH40k).

Gorkamorka is a fun vehicle skirmish game that has the advantage of everything being based around the WH40k Ork range so if you do play 40k in the future with an Ork army, your Gorkamorka stuff will do double duty. Plastic Orks and the vehicle kits are reasonably cheap as well. I have a soft spot for Gorkamorka because it’s the first boxed GW game I ever worked on - all of the colour text in the game was written by me.

23

Although I haven’t had many chances to play it, I’ve heard great things about Infinity. It’s a skirmish game that only requires a dozen or so models to play, and the model range is fantastically detailed. Sci Fi setting full of cyber-implants, biotech and hacking which are all represented in the game as well.

24

I personally like Dreampod 9’s semi-grounded mecha game, Heavy Gear Blitz: http://store.dp9.com/

Its a sci-fi game with small mechs, but tanks, infantry and other vehicles are all viable, a combined arms force tends to perform the best. It tends to scale well if you go up from a 1 or 2 squads to 6 to 8 squads or so. Unlike 40k, each squad member is able to move individually, and its also an alternating activation system, which tends to scale better.

Also, its on sale until the 3rd.

PS. Also if you do go the Warhammer route, Ebay is definitely the way to go, though you may not get the exact army you want, you can still purchase whatever you need to round out your army later, once you know the rules better.

25

Armies of Arcana uses 15mm scale, which is cheap. The original author has sold off the game unfortunately, but you can still pick up the rules and minis at http://www.lonegunmangames.com/. It always struck me as a cool system: inexpensive, geared towards armies over killer figured, but still had strong figures and magic as part of the game. I’ve only played a couple times with small armies though.

The problem you’ll find is games that are popular (Warhammer, Warmachine, etc) are terribly expensive to get into, but have fairly large player bases. Games that aren’t expensive don’t have a player base. If you don’t have friends you can rope into a less expensive system then you’re pretty much stuck with a more expensive system just so you have someone to play with.

If you go for Warmachine, I have a pretty good set of older Menoth figures I’d be willing to sell. They’re well painted already though, so if you want to paint from scratch that’s a negative, but if you want prepainted, it’d be a reasonable deal for me to basically sell them at cost and you effectively get the paint jobs for free.

26

Thanks for all the suggestions so far. I am aware of Necromunda and Mordheim, but to me, they really do not seem cheaper to play because the minis are any cheaper, they just seem cheaper to play because they are small unit/squad/warband based.

While I appreciate those types of games, they’re not really what I’m looking for here. I have all of the Descent stuff and several Blood Bowl teams, for example, so if individual unit conflict and small action type stuff were really scratching the itch, I could just use those.

I like the D&D roleplaying and other recommendations as well. I have thought about actually just buying into 4th Edition D&D and running little scenarios in a purely rules based (no roleplaying) sort of way. But that again is still somehow different from having 30 or more guys and some tanks (or fantasy warmachines) clashing.

I like the repeated references to Warmachines/Hordes. I take it (from some quick research) that Hordes is basically Warmachine fantasy?

I have looked into Warmachine in the past, but it appeared to me it suffered from the same problem I wrote above. It really did not look less expensive than WH40K because the miniatures cost less. For example, the cost for an “intro” into the game (a couple of faction starter sets, the rules - $100) seems to be the same as an intro into WHF or WH40K ($100 for the starter boxed set with two forces). The miniatures actually seemed to be about as expensive. It looked less expensive because there were fewer units in the game. Instead of having 20-30 Space Marines, you’re buying a Warcaster and 3-4 Warjacks. But you’re still paying $10+ for each Warjack, so you are only paying less because you only have 4-10 pieces of lead on the board as opposed to the greater amount of lead in WH40K. Is that assessment wrong?

Don’t get me wrong, it may still be useful to me in its own right, but I’m just suggesting that one game may not really be legitimately cheaper than another if it is only cheaper because there are fewer units that you have to buy (but those units are comparable in price).

27

Warmachine & Hordes exist in the same world and are completely compatible with each other. Warmachine is more Steampunk (Warjacks!), Hordes is all about the beasts. The two rulesets differ in how the main power is used - in Warmachine it’s “focus” and a WM game is all about resource management; in Hordes the power is “fury” and due to how it works with the beasts, Hordes is all about risk management.

The difference between the costs is that you’re going to get a genuine game of WM/Hordes for the price of the starter set. The equivalent in 40K is not much of a game, it’s too small a points total and the game doesn’t hold up very well at that level. The other thing about WM/H is that by changing a single model (the caster) you can significantly change how your army plays.

28

I really like Flames of War because it lets me get my ww2 nerd on and the scale is small enough to make painting relatively easy, but it’s not really cheap in money terms unless you load up on a tank heavy force.

I think the smallest viable force I was able to come up with had six Tiger tanks and a few stands of recon infantry.

29

Just to clarify further, I did a bit of digging. The 40k boxed set “Assault on Black Reach” is regarded as being by far the best value of the starter sets GW have done for some time. It’s $90 and contains ~400 points of Orks and ~600 points of Space Marines. The SM army also isn’t a “valid” one according to my hasty googling.

Alternatively, the SM army battleforce is also $90 and is 500 points of Marines, but is a more balanced force I think. Certainly if you added it to the AoBR set it would be a good start. The trouble is it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough still.

In the UK a normal game of 40k is 1500-1750 points, in the US it seems they prefer larger games of 2000pts+. Realistically you can eke maybe 1200 points out of the two sets.

WM/H games have certain points values for games - 15, 25, 35, 50, 75, 100, etc. The most common by far is 35, but they all get played and the lower points value games are recognised as a fun, quicker way to still get a good WM/H experience.

The WM/H battle boxes aren’t exactly 15 points but they’re usually 11-14 and they’re all pretty much balanced against each other. For $50 you get a warcaster/warlock and 2-3 jacks or beasts. To get that up to the most common points value (again, not required but we’ll go with it for the basis of comparison) differs for each army but let’s take everyone’s favourite “good” guys, Cygnar:

Boxed set

Caster: Stryker
Ironclad heavy jack
Lancer light jack
Charger light jack

Which is 11 points on its own. A random addition of crap I’ve never used to make it 35 points:

Squire ($10)
Black 13th Character unit ($17)
Long Gunners ($28)
Stormblades w/Officer+Standard ($43 + $20, ouch!)
Swordknights ($40)

The bigger chunkier infantry units are expensive if you ask me. Anyway, that fairly random selection tots up to $160 ish. That makes it $210 for a full 35-point army, compared to the $180 for part of a Space Marine army. Is it enough to be a point in WM/H’s favour? I have to say I think so, purely because of how easy it is to swap out the casters for a different experience, and because of how well the game works at 25 or 15 points.

It’s still not a cheap hobby, though. I reiterate my recommendation for Epic 40k as an awesome tabletop game that can be picked up on the cheap :D

Edit: Another major plus point for Epic is how most of the units are very simple to assemble and paint. WM/H are still some way behind GW games in terms of ease of assembly and sheer quality, though they’re improving. 40k and fantasy have some awesome models and the quality of the design is top notch.

30

If you’re going to start a no-name SM army from scratch, I’d suggest something like this:

Codex Space Marines
Assault on Black Reach Box
Space Marine Battle Force Box
1x Rhino
1x Razorback
5x Assault Marines

Plus paints, brushes, glues & green stuff (especially since you’ll want to GS up 5 of the tac marines so they can serve as vets/retinue for your commander). The minis and codex are 310USD if you buy the lot from GW directly, but there are always cheaper ways to get the stuff. The army is reasonably balanced for a vanilla marine army. There’s lots of mobility, some scoring units, some melee monsters, some serious firepower, and a bunch of termies & a commander that can be either.

But! Starting off with a 2K army is a bad idea, and starting off with a billion point army you just kind of hope you’ll think doesn’t suck, is an even worse one. I know playing 500p battles of 40K isn’t much fun, but at least try to get some idea of how all the rules work & the kind of strategies that work for you, before you start buying piles of stuff.

No matter if you go Warmachine, Warhammer or something entirely different, it’s a very, very good idea to make sure what army you want, and what you want it to look & play like, before you buy it. Otherwise you’ll just end up with all the wrong stuff.

31

Yeah, that’s good advice. Once he’s settled on a game I’m sure we can give some ideas on what armies provide which playstyles.

32

Yeah, we may have to hold off on that. I just took a look at Warmachine, and while it is cheaper than WH40K, it confirmed my expectation that it appears to be cheaper only because it needs fewer miniatures to play, not because you can field a large number of miniatures for a lower price.

I’m now pretty comfortable that I cannot, at least at this moment, justify either 40K or Warmachine.

Nothing wrong with 40K or Warmachine, just not a trigger I can personally pull at the current prices for what you get. I’m not really that interested in moving around just 6-10 minis. Particularly when the cost would still seemingly be (conservatively) $150 for two sides/armies we might be actually interested in.

I think I’m going to start looking at historical minis, smaller scale, and other things, to see whether I can get there.

In short, it’s not you Warmachine, it’s me. :)

33

Curse me for missing the obvious. You can probably get a lot of fun out of DBA.

The important points. It’s historical miniature battles from ancient egypt to the middle ages. There are no official models so the ruleset allows for whatever scale of models you prefer from 2mm to 28mm from whatever range of historical miniatures you like. When I looked into it I could get a complete army of Romans for less than $50, but prices will vary depending on where you get your minis.

As for the game itself it’s relatively fastpaced while still offering a lot of tactical choices and it can be played out in under an hour.

34

Last Epic shill, I promise.

epic-chaos-army.jpg?w=600&h=800600×800

Some glorious pics here.

35

DBA looks like fun, I’m going to seriously look into it. I’ve never even heard of it here in Michigan so finding an opponent might be hard. But, at that price I’ll build a couple armies and invite friends over or take everything to my local game shop in hopes of hooking a couple more players.

This thread has been very useful. I’m happy painting right now but I too want to build a couple armies (cheap ones) for one of these games and play with friends and family. I never even thought about looking into the historical stuff, I guess I didn’t know where to even start as there seems to be very little interest in the genre where I live.

36

If WM is too small scale for you, how many bodies are you looking to see on the field? Flames of War is a pretty decent WW2 era game with very small scale minis (often 2-5 infantry on a stand supported by assorted vehicles or guns), with units of 4-10 stands. I don’t remember the cost of models much though.

37

One thing about DBA is that you can collect a wide variety of armies as there are army lists covering almost every imaginable army of the pre-gunpowder age and they can all fight eachother (though cross-historical battles aren’t necessarily very balanced), the real limiting factor is generally the availability of good models. Ideally you want armies that are going to fight eachother to be the same scale but maybe you can’t find a good source of 15mm ancient Persians to match your 15mm 10th century Normans.

All DBA gamers I know have two or more armies. It’s easy to switch, not prohibitvely expensive and like you said it gives them a chance to entice other players into a game. And at smaller scales they don’t take up much storage space either.

38

I should mention that I played WH40K back in the early 90s. Had a Chaos Marine force. Also played a bit of Epic (I had the basic box set with the rules, etc.). Played Space Marines.

I thought Epic was out of print. Unlike Mordheim and Necromunda (for which you could use an array of models), it doesn’t seem possible to play Epic without buying models from GW. Plus they seem to have a limited selection, and are as expensive as usual for GW, with Titans costing $40-50 each. Or you could go the eBay route, but I’d imagine that it being out of print, cheap deals are few and far in between.

The other issue that probably kills Epic for me is that I’m doing this at least in part to scratch the painting itch. With Epic, I’ll either be spray painting it all one color (which doesn’t scratch the painting itch) or going insane trying to paint models that are that small.

How does one really acquire Epic stuff these days (unless they bought a bunch of it in the 90s)?

As a side note, it does look incredibly cool though. :)

Is it 4-10 stands per side in the game usually? I obviously don’t have an exact number in mind, I’m just looking for something that feels more like pushing a tray of cavalry, death knights, or jetbikes around (or for games that use individual units and not trays, running around 30-40 space marines/knights/soldiers plus 4-5 warmachines from smaller sized bikes/armored cars/etc. up through tanks or giant battering rams).

39

it’s probably closer to 30 stands of infantry, less if you play mechanized. I enjoyed painting the tanks. The infantry, much less so, but they came out okay. I based my force on able company from company of heroes and found that the d-day assault company army list included most of those units, even the M8’s and quad cannon halftracks (which incidentally are amazing aircraft denial)

40

There’s actually a rule set out there for a LEGO squad based tactical game ala WH.

http://www.brikwars.com/