Welcome to Goonhammer Historicals Essentials. With Historicals being more accessible, more popular and more plastic than ever, it’s time for you to get involved, so we’re putting together step to step guides to answer your questions, solve your issues and get you started with gaming in the wild and varied world of Historical miniatures.
There are a million places you can get ideas, colour guides and general information on whatever historical period you want to play, but the most common and usually most useful tend to be the Osprey Guides. We’ll usually recommend picking one up alongside a new force or a new period – “Want to play this game with this force? Get this Osprey!” – as a one-stop-shop for just about everything that a wargamer needs to get going in their historical period of choice.
Osprey Publishing have been running for more than 50 years, with the most common wargaming purchase, the Men at Arms series, now pushing towards an astonishing 600 different titles. With multiple series, styles and subjects, picking up a relevant Osprey isn’t difficult, but picking the right one is a bit trickier, so as part of our Essentials series here’s our guide to getting all you need to feel researched, knowledgeable and full of ideas.
Osprey Guides and Wargaming
Osprey Guides are very useful for starting or expanding forces. It might be an entirely new period to you and you want the basic gaming-relevant information, or perhaps you’re expanding an existing force with new colour schemes. One of the main reasons we recommend Ospreys is that they are well illustrated, present information clearly and include a good mix of battlefield info and the lived experience of their subjects. That means that picking up one of the Men at Arms, Warrior or Campaign series will serve you well for any period*. If you’re not sure what your soldiers should be wearing, the colours they could have or how they fought, these are the ones to go for.
*If you’re more Boats and Planes inclined, the relevant series are Fleet, Air Campaign, Dogfight, Vanguard and Air Vanguard.
A well chosen Osprey title will set you up for wargaming in a new period quickly and – more or less – comprehensively. They’ll provide weapons, uniforms, organisation, histories and campaigns in one handy package that will let you make decisions around painting, collecting and gaming from a place of knowledge. Osprey has been publishing the three key series for decades, so be aware that older titles are not always as clear and straightforward – and can occasionally be written with a questionable agenda, but they are at least going to be useful. Let’s have a look at these series, with a worked example of my current WW2 project to see what each one can provide.
Men At Arms
Men at Arms is Osprey’s largest and best known series, with a stonking 532 titles currently available for purchase. They cover units, armies and conflicts through the lens of a single focus – usually a particular regiment, nation or group, and run the spectrum from incredibly specific to the very general. There will be an option – if not many, many options – for any period or force you’re interested in.
Pick up one of the Men at Arms series for specific uniform painting and modelling guidance, getting the one closest to what you’re after. Each one will contain:
- An overview of the subject and people covered – in varying detail.
- Colour plates illustrating key uniforms and equipment.
- Description of uniforms, including changes and developments over time.
These are directly useful to wargamers – the right Men at Arms issue will support you to pick up the paintbrush, bits and glue to quickly and easily get a good degree of accuracy and get your army to the board. It’s stripped down, expecting a basic level of knowledge on the conflict or era (you’ll not get an overview of the entirety of WW2, for example).
They provide a very quick overview of the role played by the subject during the conflict and can zoom in very close to cover whatever you’re after. My French Imperial Guard army relied on the (near dozen) Men At Arms books covering just the French Guard in the Napoleonic period, while the next project – Napoleon’s Army in Egypt – will use just one.
Men at Arms: Yugoslav Armies 1941-45
As I wanted to start a Yugoslav Partisan force for a club Chain of Command campaign, Osprey was my first port of call. Yugoslav Armies 1941-45 was published in 2022, making it a very modern title in the series. It’s a great overview of the conflict in Yugoslavia from March 1941 through to the victory of Tito’s Partisans in 1945. It covers the Chetniks, Partisans, the Yugoslavian army, along with their uniforms, equipment and introductions to how they fought.
Illustrations throughout are fantastic – there are dozens of photographs reproduced and the colour plates and art pieces (by Johnny Shumate, veteran illustrator for Osprey) are great. They’re clear, reproducible and varied and provide a perfect starting point for a modelling project.
I used this title to establish my overall painting scheme – greys, browns, tans and greens – and to find out the key details of the clothes my models should be wearing. It also influenced modelling decisions. This included the vitally important Titovka cap – I then scoured my bits box and abandoned projects to find as many suitable side caps as possible. I also picked up some sprues of Italian, German, French, and British weapons, to represent the huge range of equipment used by the Partisans.
This sounds small, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that makes an army project work. My Partisans have a heterogenous selection of kit, mostly in a unified colour range, with a proliferation of titovkas and clearly liberated weapons from their foes.
Warrior
With the project begun, I wanted more details on the force I was representing, particularly in how the Partisans were organised, fought and were equipped. I had painted some models and given them a selection of appropriate weapons, but how would I actually fight with this army? What tactics did they use? What support options for Chain of Command should I model?
The Warrior series looks at these questions, moving from a general overview and guide to uniforms into the actions, experiences and tactics of smaller groups than the Men at Arms series covers. It might be a specific regiment in a specific battle, or for periods of antiquity the experience of a warrior from an area or nation. They contain a lot of information if you want to go a little further – and particularly if you want to model and play an army beyond “what works as an army list” into a version of historical accuracy. The further depth they go into is very useful for us as wargamers, suggesting kitbashes, conversions or alternative paint schemes, in addition to how you could be using your models on the battlefield.
Warrior books have been published since the early 1990s, so you’re less likely to trip over a stained and faded book with some dodgy language than you are with the Men at Arms series. If you already know exactly what you want to do – say, Constantine’s Roman Legions you can go straight to the relevant Warrior issue.
If Men at Arms gets you painting and collecting, Warrior titles get you onto the battlefield, creating lists and playing games. As a more focused, longer, deep dive into a specific army or soldier, they’re perfect for getting your historicals army to table.
Warrior: Tito’s Partisans 1941-45
This is a comprehensive introduction and history of the Yugoslavian Partisans under Tito – why, how, who, when and where they fought, their tactics and progression throughout the war, the major campaigns they fought, and what they used to do so. It, like all the Warrior series, draws extensively from primary source material, reproduces dozens of photographs, contains a series of colour images – including art commissioned for the book – and suggests a wide range of further reading. This is an older one than the Yugoslavian Armies Men at Arms, published 2003, but holds up well, only possibly lacking a bit more colour art than recently published books.
This was an extremely useful book for the Partisan project, shaping the look of the army and the models included, contributing to three main areas:
Provided photographs and illustrations of what female partisans wore, allowing me to include some into the army in the nearest I could get to the right uniforms (Bad Squiddo Soviets).
Confirmed a heterogenous mix of uniforms – Italian, German, Yugoslavian, Civilian, and British, giving me a lot of options for further conversions and kitbashes based on a wide range of plastic kits
Set out the Chain of Command support options I’ll need to model – captured German antitank guns, light machine gun sections based around British Brens and, eventually, Soviet issued T-34 tanks
Campaign
Campaign books look at a conflict in painstaking detail, usually drawing from primary sources and undertaking original research to dive in depth on a given campaign or series of battles. They detail strategy, organisation and logistics, with accompanying maps, deployment schema and orders of battle. You’re less likely to get uniform guides here, though pertinent changes or adaptations of uniforms can feature if they’re relevant to the campaign. These are usually well illustrated with pictures and colour maps, with occasional full spread art pieces.
Use Campaign books to focus in on refighting specific battles or campaigns, or to build a force tied to a particular place and time. They’re definitely the next step up – you’ve painted your army, you’ve worked out how they fought and now it’s time to get ideas for the next big club campaign, or for a series of narrative games.
Campaign: Yugoslavia 1941-44
The newest of the bunch, this campaign book was released earlier this year and is an excellent example of Osprey’s approach to the series in the modern day. Beautifully illustrated (Johnny Shumate, again!),well researched and with exceptionally detailed and useful maps, it covers the various anti-partisan campaigns of Italian, German and Chetnik forces from the fall of Yugoslavia through to the reformation of Tito’s partisan army as the Yugoslavian Army in 1944. This focuses much more on the German and Italian efforts to suppress the partisan movement, and includes a near exhaustive detail of who was fighting and where. There’s a huge amount here to dig into, and suggestions for wargaming fairly leap off the page, with mass battles, skirmishes, asymmetric scenario ideas and terrain building projects aplenty.
I disagreed with the main premise in the end – that the Partisan operation had a much more minor effect on the course of the war than history (and Tito, and Churchill, and virtually everyone else) has agreed, but it was well researched and backed up with a lot of further reading – most of which I’ve done over the last few months! It’s a nice place to end a trip into the background of your army if you’re not someone who goes into hyper-obsession mode, giving you more than enough detail to feel, if not like an expert, then at least someone who can discuss their army’s background with the best of them!
Reading this campaign book set me out on a campaign building spree, selecting scenarios from a variety of games that would suit a refought campaign in Yugoslavia – Bolt Action for mass battles, Chain of Command for skirmishes, even 0200 Hours for raids and infiltrations. These books open up a huge range of possibilities – taking me from nicely painted models through to an army list and far beyond.
Ospreys Are Essentials
There’s a lot to think about when starting a Historicals force, but hopefully the above has given you at least one shortcut – the thinking is a lot easier with an Osprey in hand! We’d recommend them time and time again whether you’re just starting out in this wonderful hobby or you’re looking to pick up a new force and a new period. Once you’ve got your models, paints, dice and rulebook, an Osprey – or two, or three, or a dozen – is absolutely your next essential purchase.
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