Continuing our “Essentials” series, today we’re going to talk about a critically important aspect of tabletop wargaming: how various types of scale representation interact and how to decide which games or miniatures to choose to give us the desired results.
I’m sure we’ve all had this experience – you’re looking at your 1-inch tall figure on the table. Ostensibly, that figure is supposed to represent a guy who’s about 6 feet tall. So if 1 inch equals 6 feet, that means my weapon with a range of 24″ can shoot all the way out to…144 feet? That’s less than 50 yards!?! The problem becomes even worse if you are looking at Primaris Space Marines, where a ~1.5 inch tall figure represents a dude who’s like 8 feet tall. Now you’re talking a 24″ range translating to something like 128 feet.
While having accurate fire out to only 40+ yards is the kind of marksmanship one might expect from the twitchiest of Ork Boyz (or whatever corrosive goo gets vomited out of a Tyranid bio-weapon), you would think that the paragon of human excellence that is the Primaris Space Marine would be able to at least match the modern day infantryman, trained to reliably engage targets at 300 meters. So what gives?
The answer, of course, is a mismatch in scale. But “scale” is a tricky and often overloaded term, so let’s take a moment to define what we mean when we bandy about this critically important word.
Types of Scale
When veterans of wargames (especially historical wargames) talk about “scale,” they’re often talking about several very different things – sometimes simultaneously! Generally speaking, there are four different aspects of tabletop wargaming that can (and do) all get rolled under the term “scale,” and if you’re not careful it can make things really confusing. Throughout this article I am going to try my best to be very explicit to make clear which kind I’m referring to, so apologies if it seems a little wordy.
In any event, defining each of these concepts individually we have:
Figure Scale
The first and most commonly used meaning for “scale” refers to the overall size of the miniatures themselves. So when you hear people throw out terms like “6mm” or “1/72”, they’re talking about the size of the figures and/or vehicles. Generally speaking, the sizes of human(oid) figures are often (but not always) expressed as a real distance that measures “height from ground to eye-level.” Thus, if you stuck a ruler up to an ideal “28mm” miniature who was sculpted to be standing upright, the distance from the bottom of his foot to the level of his gaze would measure exactly 28mm.
Why eye-level? Well, if you simply measure to the “top” of the miniature, then the figure scale of your miniature might vary based on their attire, specifically their headgear. I blame Napoleonic wargames (where everyone on the battlefield is wearing a shako, bicorne, czapka, or some other ridiculous tall hat) but Vostroyan Astra Militarum dudes would be just as guilty. OK, now I am suddenly picturing a tall-hatted Vostroyan scaled to the same overall top-height as a bandana-wearing Catachan and chuckling that the Vostroyan would look like a literal child next to the death-worlder. Heh. But anyway, in order to make your body proportions consistent across a range of different possible uniform/headgear options, eye-level is used instead of overall height.
Aside: You will sometimes hear the term “heroic scale” used when describing miniatures. Typically, it means that the miniature does not conform to “normal” human proportions, and that certain parts of the miniature (usually the head and hands) will be larger than expected. Much of this dates back to the days of physical sculpting, when artists were using green stuff to create the master figures from which spin-cast molds were made. Carving tiny details like fingers or delicate facial features is really hard, so heads and hands were often overly large as a result – especially for guys in really tiny figure scales like 15mm or smaller. Nowadays, most of the big miniature manufacturers have their sculptors working in CAD models rather than with physical media. Plastic injection molding has gotten to a point where even subtle details can print crisply enough to be apparent. These factors combine to allow for more “true scale” (i.e. realistically proportioned) minis. Take a look at the 12mm Victrix WW2 miniatures and prepare to have your mind blown at how much detail they can put on such small miniatures.
But because nothing is ever easy, vehicles are generally expressed as a fraction of their actual size, like 1/48 or 1/72. This is both a hold-over from the scale modeling world (which has a veritable cornucopia of different options for sizes) and a nod to the fact that vehicles don’t have any kind of standard feature that could equate to an “eye-level.” This is especially true of whatever weird alien shit in which the Aeldari are going to swoop into battle.
For whatever game you’re playing, it’s critical to know what figure and vehicle scale you are using, as every vehicle fractional vehicle scale has a roughly corresponding human eye-level height (e.g. 28mm and 1/56 are the same scale, or 20mm is pretty close to 1/72).
But here’s the dirty secret about figure scale – despite what the game manufacturer may tell you, it largely doesn’t matter! There’s nothing stopping you from playing a game with miniatures of a different figure scale, and some games (especially forward-thinking historical wargames) may give you suggestions for playing their game at a bunch of different figure scales (Pickett’s Charge, which we reviewed here is a great example).
Don’t believe me? Try the following – grab a handful of Legions Imperialis minis (a couple of stands of infantry and a few tanks) and play a full-on game of 40K on a 2’x3′ board, but measuring all movement and shooting ranges in centimeters instead of inches. Aside from needing a way to track casualties on a multi-figure base (infantry in LI is five to a base), the game will play exactly the same but will easily fit on your kitchen table. And if you wanted to individually base those little infantry on tiny washers, you could have a pocket-sized, travel-friendly game of Kill Team.
Sick, right?
Where figure scale does matter is if you are planning to buy miniatures from multiple manufacturers. In these cases it’s good to know how well each manufacturer adheres to their advertised figure scale. “Scale creep” is definitely a thing, and one manufacturer’s idea of what constitutes 28mm might be noticeably different from another’s (see above under “heroic scale”). This is why scale comparisons between miniature companies is such a helpful thing, as it helps you decide which figures are going to match well with each other on the tabletop.
And of course where this is critically important is when you are kit-bashing across manufacturers (which is a thing you absolutely can and should do!). Nothing is worse than doing an arm/weapon swap on your Viking warlord to get the perfect battleaxe pose only to discover that he now looks like he has tiny T-Rex arms. No one’s going to take that dude seriously on the battlefield.
But apart from kit-bashing, for the most part small variations are fine. The very “true scale” WW2 miniatures I got from Perry Miniatures are noticeably smaller than the more heroically-proportioned Black Tree American GIs in my collection, but at tabletop distances these differences aren’t really noticeable. Typically you won’t even twig to it until they get right next to each other like in close combat.
Ground Scale
Next, let’s talk about “ground scale,” which describes how distances on the tabletop represent distances in the real world. And this is where the bolter range problem lives, because the size of the battlefield that a game like Warhammer 40K is trying to represent is larger than the figure scale of the miniatures being used to play it.
And for the record, lots of games suffer from this issue. My first historical wargame was an American Civil War game called Gettysburg Soldiers. The intended figure scale was 15mm, but the ground scale was 1″ = 25 yards. Thus, a musket range of 12″ was 300 yards, a realistic range for that kind of weapon under those conditions. But that meant that the figure scale to ground scale ratio was something like 7.5-to-1. Scaled to a map representation of the battlefield your units were veritable giants striding around the countryside.
One way that most games “cheat” when it comes to fudging differences between figure scale and ground scale is by making the size of the terrain features scale to the same as the figure scale. So when your tiny soldier is standing next to a fence or a house, that feature looks appropriate. But an important ramification of this is that your features will have a different “footprint” on the table, being both larger and comparatively closer together than they would be in real life. This in turn only really matters if you’re trying to match your battlefield to represent a particular real-life place, something that generally only applies to re-enacting specific historical battles.
The Holy Grail, of course, is to play a game where the figure scale matches the ground scale. For instance, in Chain of Command the intended ground-scale is 1 foot = 40 yards, or 1/120. This means if you’re playing Chain of Command with 15mm figures (which are roughly 1/110 scale), your figure and ground scales match pretty well. And having played the game this way, I can confirm that the resulting battle both looks and “feels” realistic. It also helps that weapon ranges for all but pistols and SMGs in Chain of Command are defined as “Can I see it? If so, I can shoot it.” That kicks ass.
But if you are playing a game that doesn’t have any stated ground scale, the only way you’re going to notice this is because the weapon ranges will seem unrealistically short. Just know that the game you’re playing is a bit of an abstraction, typically for reasons of game balance.
Unit Scale
Another common use of the term “scale” pertains to the size of the units that are to be represented on the tabletop. This is generally referred to as “unit scale.” Unit scale is an important consideration because at the end of the day it boils down to “how many minis will I need to buy/paint to play this game?”
For instance, is each player controlling a single platoon? A full company? Or are the players’ forces meant to represent entire brigades or divisions in a massive clash? Thus, when someone says, “it’s a platoon-scale game,” they mean that the size of each player’s force represents roughly 30 to 50 men.
Further, while most historical wargames express unit scales in terms of real-world military formations like platoon or company or battalion, many sci-fi games lack this kind of specificity. While we know to the most minute detail the structure of a Space Marine company from the fluff, the more important consideration is how many “points” you’ll use for building your army list. This can be important for certain historical games too – in games with a competitive component like Bolt Action or Team Yankee it helps to know what points value you’re building towards.
Representative Scale
Finally, we get to the question of how many actual people will each figure on the tabletop represent? We call this – you guessed it – “representative scale.” For smaller unit scale games (such as Nordic Weasel’s WW2 fireteam unit scale game “5 Men at Kursk” or Stand 2 Games’ squad unit scale Napoleonic skirmish game “Forager”), each figure can easily represent a single man. Even at unit scales up to platoon, your representative scale might still be 1-to-1 (where each figure represents a single soldier). But as the forces involved in games get bigger, things get complicated. Unless you’re pimping out a church hall and playing the entire battle of Waterloo at 1-to-1 representative-scale, you’re generally faced with a choice – have each figure represent multiple men in the unit, or make the miniatures smaller. Or in many cases, both! Representative scale tends to be fairly tightly coupled with unit-scale owing purely to the impracticality of representing large forces in miniature.
Tying It All Together
As I am sure you can already see, these four types of “scale” are different but can be related to each other. Taken collectively, they are going to give games a very different “look and feel” from each other. The interplay between figure scale and ground scale in particular is going to have a strong effect on how a game looks, both good and bad. The egregious mismatch between the figure and ground scales of Team Yankee is a good example – the miniatures are at 15mm figure scale and 1-to-1 representative scale, but the size of the forces (company unit scale or larger) and the command distances seem intended for a much larger ground scale (which in turn results in very short communication and weapon ranges). As a result, the vehicles in a typical Team Yankee unit usually end up touching each other, and with the short ranges multiple units get crowded really close together. It makes the game-in-progress look like a tank parking lot. Even if the game is fun, it looks ridiculous to me and severely detracts from one of my favorite parts of the hobby – the spectacle of realistic-looking units engaging on a cool-looking battlfield. I have seen Team Yankee played at 6mm figure scale and it looks orders of magnitude better. I think at 3mm it would look spot-on.
But do you want to paint 3mm tanks? As mentioned previously, the figure and ground scales for Chain of Command match at 15mm figure scale – but I and almost everyone I know plays it at 28mm scale. Why? Because you can use the Bolt Action minis you probably already had to play it. Also, I just enjoy painting slightly bigger figures as I find it just a little bit easier to pick out the important details at 28mm than I do at 15mm. So I am choosing the mismatch purely for aesthetic reasons. And that’s OK!
But if you want to paint up a bunch of models really quickly (say to represent a very large force on the tabletop), then maybe a smaller figure scale is the way to go. 6mm vehicles are as simple as: base-coat, dry-brush, done. Easy!
Practical Application
So now that we’ve gotten our terms straight and have some sense of what each type of “scale” really means, how do we use this knowledge to help decide which games we want to play and which figures we want to buy? I’m going to assume that you already know which period or conflict you’re interested in and are trying to pick between multiple offerings of both rules and figures, so let’s skip that part for now and get into the nitty-gritty.
Picking a Unit Scale
Probably the best place to start is by deciding on a unit scale, such that we an idea of how many miniatures we’ll need to purchase, assemble, and paint. The combination of unit scale and representative scale is also going to give you some sense of what is going to be abstracted in a game. If personal heroics are what you’re looking for in a game, then you’re probably going to want a 1-to-1 representative scale game (where each miniature represents an individual soldier), which in turn probably means a smaller unit scale (say, platoon or smaller). If you want to see one of your tiny men run up and skewer their tiny foes with spears or bayonets, then a smaller unit scale might be for you.
But if the vagaries of command-and-control of large formations are what you’re all about, play a larger unit scale game (battalion, brigade, or division) and maybe go with a larger representative scale such that you don’t have to paint so many tiny soldiers. In the aforementioned Gettysburg Soldiers rules, I was using 4 figures per 50-man “stand” of infantry, a representative scale of 12.5-to-1. Thus, fielding a 300-man regiment only required me to paint 24 tiny dudes. Easy and looks great on the tabletop. And importantly, that block of 24 dudes moved and fought as a single unit.
Generally speaking, the larger the unit scale the more important things like communication, logistics, and units following orders are going to be. Coordinating the movements of large groups of men – on a noisy battlefield where people are shooting at you – is difficult, especially in the age before reliable radio communications.
Larger unit scales (and corresponding ground scales) are also going to make things like artillery more important. In small unit scale games, artillery is often abstracted. In Chain of Command, for instance, an artillery barrage doesn’t damage the troops on the table but rather complicates the deployment of troops to the table. That’s because the ground scale that the tabletop represents is a small enough area that both forces are already “danger close” for real artillery (you don’t call down 155mm howitzers on an enemy only 50-100 yards away unless you’re suicidal). In that game, the artillery is being used to pound the area in which the enemy is forming up prior to deployment (i.e. well behind and on the approaches to the battlefield), which is why it affects deployment instead. Clever, but if you like lobbing shells at your foes and seeing them explode, you might want a larger unit scale game.
Picking a Figure Scale
Once you’ve decided which game(s) you want to play, you need to start thinking about which miniatures you want to use, which means picking a figure scale. I cannot understate this: there are loads of different figure scales from which to choose. If the game you’re playing doesn’t already dictate a particular figure scale (and even if it does – see above under Team Yankee being better looking at smaller scales) the decision of which one to go with can be daunting.
Availability is probably the biggest concern. You might decide you want to buy and paint models of a particular figure scale only to discover that no one makes them in that size. “What, no one makes Hussite Wars figures in 22.5mm scale?!? Oh, the humanity, my concept is ruined!!!” This is increasingly less of an issue now that 3D printing has become ubiquitous and affordable, but it’s usually worth a little bit of Googling to determine which manufacturers support the period and figure scale you want to use.
But at the end of the day, probably the best advice is to go with whatever figure scale your opponents already have. In the event that you don’t have any existing opponents and are free to choose whatever scale you want, then let aesthetics and cost be your guide. Generally speaking, tinier figures are cheaper but you’ll usually want/need more of them.
And if you do have the dubious good fortune to not have anyone else that already plays your game in a particular scale, remember that you are likely going to have to build interest in the game among your local players yourself. That of course means getting and painting up two forces such that you can lend one out to prospective converts to try out the game. Keep that in mind when considering your options.
Finally, spare a moment to think about terrain. 3D prints and resin casts may again make this easier than it was in the past, but unless you plan to scratch-build all of your terrain to fit your bespoke figure scale, picking a common one like 28mm or 15mm is going to make purchasing terrain much easier.
Painting Ramifications
Another consideration for picking both your game and your miniatures is going to be the ease of getting everything painted. For larger figure scales like 28mm, all of the tips, tricks, and skills you have from painting miniatures for 40K or Age of Sigmar or most other tabletop games are going to translate across perfectly, so just keep doing what you’ve been doing in the past.
But as you get to smaller and smaller figure scales (which usually involves larger unit scales and thus painting more and more individual figures), shortcuts are going to become increasingly important. In this regard, I think contrast/speed paints have been a real boon to the hobby in recent years. The ability to get good looking results from slapping a quick coat of contrast onto a mini – especially a really tiny one – means you can crank out a bunch of troops really quickly. At 10mm or smaller you’re not going to want to have to worry about dry-brushing or highlighting your figures, so do yourself a favor and invest in some contrast/speed paints to cover the main colors of your force(s). With really tiny figures it’s more about the overall impression of serried ranks of dudes than about individual details anyway.
Scaling Up
A final thing to consider is that you can often use the same miniatures for multiple games. There’s nothing stopping you from building a small force for a game aimed at smaller skirmish unit scales (say as few as 10-30 minis per side), then slowly building up your force to handle larger and larger unit scales. This is one of the joys of historical wargames, as miniatures bought once can almost always be re-used for different rule sets as your collection grows. If you are interested in multiple games that might reasonably use the same miniatures, try to pick a figure scale that bridges all of them if possible.
Parting Shots
Hopefully this discussion of the different ways we toss around the word “scale” has been useful and can serve as a jumping off point for you to expand your wargames collection into new and interesting eras!
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