I just want to toss out the name of heroscape out there. In its current state it has been dropped from production, and the prices have really shot up, which might defeat the whole point of it, but regardless, i found it to be an amazingly fun and deep, affordable mini game.
I bought the rise of valkire master set for $25 us about a year ago which gave you everything you need to know about the game to play it and see if you like it.
The most interesting piece of heroscape is the terrain. It is made up of plastic hex pieces of various size that lock together and can be stacked and is quite rugged so won’t break or come apart easily. You can throw together pretty awesome 3d boards of various size and shape for the figures to battle over.
The game itself has prepainted minis of pretty much any genera you can think of from fantasy to western to sci fi. Every unit has a point value which is used to make the army. Units can be solo, more powerful heros with hitpoints, or made up of multiple cheap common squads that can have 3 figures per unit card, and you might end up say taking 3 common squads for 9 figures on the board. Some large units can take up 2 hexes.
The units have dice counts for attack and defense, then range, and movement. In addition they have some special rules or moves that are as unique as the units themselves that give different advantages or disadvantages. Being above a unit gives you +1 attack/defense when interacting with units below you. When you are ajacent to a unit and try to disengage you suffer a pretty brutal free attack.
Line of sight is very loose and fun, a part of the unit card shows you the targetable area on a unit and a sight point, which is usually the head. So to check LOS i just look from behind my chars head to see if i can see a body part on my enemy that is marked on red on his unit card. There is a zombie unit and the only LOS part of him that is targetable is the head, which is sort of funny :)
The game is quite fun, and drafting an army and watching them work out on varying landscapes, all for pretty low prices, make this a pretty amazing minature game.
But again, now it might be hard to find, and prices have increased, but just to give an example, I went nuts about 2 years ago when I found out about it, and spent about 300 dollars over the year on it, and I basically have about 100+ figures, a ton of terrain, roads, trees, fortresses, adn have even made some custom terrain for it.
The selling format of the game was basically master sets to get you started, and I totally recommend if you can find rise of the valkyrie to start, bar that swarm of the marrow master set. The other units they then sell in booster packs that were about 8 bucks each, in ‘waves’. Basically each wave would have 1 pack of say 5 hero figures, then packs of common units that match with 1 or 2 of the heros. The place they got you was to effectively use common squads you need 2 to 3 of them, so for example I wanted knights of weston, which came in a pack of 4 knights + 3 of another unit I didn’t care about, and I bought 2 of them for 14 dollars.
Unfortunately now some packs are going for around 25 each, which is like tripple the price, but ebay might help you out.
Finally, the authority on all things heroscape, including amazing set of maps to build, can be found at, well I can’t post links yet, but the site is heroscapers with the com on the end :)
