In the Essentials series, our aim is to get you interested in historical wargaming; but showing off cool games, recommending awesome models, and saving you tons of money is only a small part of the battle. We at Goonhammer Historicals have had this conversation before, and we often hear the same anxieties. We’re going to address those anxieties head on, without obfuscation, so you can make a properly informed choice. The first, and probably most common, concern on the docket – what if my opponent gives me a hard time over historical accuracy?
We can all imagine the situation. You’ve just spent a fortune (well, around £50-100 maybe) on a brand new SAGA army, your first historical game. As Age of Chivalry just came out you picked up a set of Victrix Foot Knights, and asked a friend to 3D print you some of the Medbury crossbowmen. Your good friends over on your favourite community, Goonhammer.com, suggested that the French battleboard would be an easy start. An elite force with a simple gameplan – get up close and mulch them with big armoured boys. Sounds like fun. You do a quick google search for what French knights might have looked like, find a colour scheme that you like, and soon enough (or not soon enough, depending on your usual pace), they’re all done.
Game day finally arrives, and you start unpacking your newly painted little knights and putting them on the table. Your opponent (for the sake of playing into the stereotype let us imagine he’s a vaguely academic looking gentleman in his mid-50s) immediately snorts in amused disapproval.
“You fool,” he says. “You nincompoop, nabob and naysayer.”
“I don’t understand,” you whisper, stricken with panic.
“Your knights, sir,” he replies, “are clearly wearing heraldic colours which only became prominent during the Huguenot Rebellions of the 1560s. They are wholly inappropriate for our game, which only covers the early 1520s at the latest.”
He guffaws, pointing at you mockingly as tears roll down your hot, embarrassed cheeks. Soon, the whole club joins in. In disgrace, you are driven out of the historicals community in shame, flecks of spittle from your persecutors’ angry pedantry still rolling down your face.
Okay, so, I may have overstated this anxiety just a touch. I exaggerate only to amuse, and with no intention of belittling this worry with hyperbole. One of the most common concerns we in the historicals space hear when we attempt to convince others to get into our side of things is some variation of, “I don’t want people to give me a hard time over accuracy.” This is understandable, it’s annoying to spend a lot of time and money on your cool army, only to have some annoying arse with no social skills just immediately start nitpicking everything. Wrong colour, wrong buttons, wrong weapons, what didn’t you get wrong? This worry certainly isn’t helped by the fact that you don’t have to look all that far to see people doing that in the comments of our own historicals posts here on the site. Let me tell you, a lot of people have already informed us that the vehicle in the header image “isn’t a tank, it’s a tank destroyer”. Thanks lads, keep it up.
But here’s the secret information that you might be surprised by: this has literally never happened to me in person, other than when used as a joke to mock this exact behaviour. A lot of people care a lot about the accuracy of their own models, but far less are invested in the accuracy of other peoples’. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen to anyone at all, it definitely does. But for myself, and for other historicals gamers who I asked, it is either an extremely rare occurrence or has never happened. In fact, the majority of anecdotes about this kind of nonsense happening in-person that I do hear doesn’t come from historical games at all, but from other, non-historical games. I will leave the names of those games a mystery, so you can debate it at your own leisure.
While the fear of being harangued by pedants at every turn is largely unfounded, it is certainly true that as a historical wargamer you often need to think about the question of “accuracy” more than the average 40k player. While no one is going to nitpick the exact shade of khaki you’re using for your WW2 British paratroopers, your opponents may at least be a bit puzzled if you do them all in hot pinks. Well, most would be, I’d be delighted. But the question of accuracy isn’t really one question, but several. So let’s go through the different aspects of accuracy that we need to at least briefly consider before starting a new project.
Uniforms and Equipment Accuracy
This is likely the most common concern, and we’ve already made reference to it in our little roleplayed skit above. What’s the right shade? Which weapon is the right weapon? Well, thankfully this one is perhaps the easiest to solve. For painting, there’s a very good chance we’ve written about it already. If we haven’t, we will eventually! If you can’t wait, or your period is so obscure you think we’ll never get around to it, acquire the relevant Osprey Publishing Men-at-Arms book, of which there are over 500. These books contain all of the basic information about your historical force that you’re ever likely to need for the purposes of wargaming (and probably more besides, you don’t really need to know very much), and they contain full-colour pages with lots of uniform variations on display.
If you can’t acquire a relevant book for whatever reason, just google it. With a bit of searching you’ll get the generally correct information, and the specifics of exact hue and clothing from that point are largely irrelevant. You may wonder why. Surely the Napoleonic British lineman wore a very specific shade of red? Well no, not really. We’ve shared the above image in articles before, and it’s an illustrative point. Even as late as WW2, the exact shade of a uniform depended on a range of factors, not limited to theatre of war, wear and tear, the quality of the dye, the factory it was made in, the time it was made, and umpteen other factors besides. German WW2 infantrymen generally wore mid-tone greys. That’s the important bit, the rest is not going to be remarked upon or even noticed.
Failing internet searches or Osprey books, just look at the picture on the packaging, if packaging you do have. That’ll do ya.
A compounding factor is the fact that the further we go back in history, the less consistently uniformed the average soldier even was. In much of the medieval period, the average enlisted soldier would wear basically the same things regardless of which side they were on, because in most places they weren’t mandated to be supplied with any equipment. If your local lord was particularly generous, it’s possible that he might invest in some equipment so that his little contingent of enlisted serfs looked a bit more impressive, but there was no requirement for them to do so. To try and avoid stabbing each other all the time, military forces would often wear an identifying mark – a badge of their leader’s house, or a coloured item of clothing. Different cities in Flanders issued their troops with chaperons (hats) of different colours, which is a rather whimsical and a fun project idea, come to think of it.
In the classical period there’s obviously a fair amount more in the way of uniforms, at least for the organised citizen troops that made up at least part of the armies of empires like Rome and Carthage. But that was a really, really long time ago, and a lot of what we even consider to be “correct” is based more on pop culture than evidence. Did Roman soldiers wear red, for instance? Well yes probably, but there’s also evidence for them wearing other colours as well. We just landed on red as the default. So paint some blue legionaries, if you like. Paint some white ones. I’m not your mother.
In the Napoleonic period, there was also a dense collection of very specific uniforms, but it’s important to note that no uniform survives contact with the enemy, or the average soldier for that matter. This is also true for any conflict in human history. You’re crawling through the mud after your unit has just been bombarded by arrows/cannon/artillery, and you tear your trousers open on a sharp rock. Well shit. After the battle, you go to your quartermaster/lord/mercenary captain and ask for a new pair. Sorry pal, no spares. But the unit over there didn’t see much action, go ask them. And that’s how your French infantryman ends up wearing the blue trousers of an artilleryman for the rest of the campaign.
For equipment accuracy, the level to which this matters at all depends somewhat on the model scale and period that you’re using, and on what the equipment is, exactly. Nobody’s going to complain that your WW2 French soldier is wielding a Lebel rifle instead of a MAS-36. The scale is too small, that is unless they look really closely and also know a lot about French rifles, and are also a dickhead. And may I add, are also wrong, because some units were stuck using the Lebel due to equipment shortages, so nyehh, take that, guy I made up to make a point. For weapons in warfare prior to standardised military equipment, go nuts. Ultimately it’s just a load of pointy metal.
Of course, at 28mm people might notice if you’re using, say, a WW1 British Mark V tank instead of a WW2 Matilda Mk II. But this is no different than using a Spartan in place of a Vindicator for your Space Marines, including the bit where if your opponent is chill they may just let you do it anyway, as long as you point it out before the game starts. At smaller scales, equipment accuracy matters less and less. You’d have to be pretty obsessive to notice the difference between two similar American Civil War artillery pieces in 15mm scale, and downright superhuman to pick out different model variations in 3-6mm.
The final point to make is that while, yes, the majority of soldiers of a certain rank in a specific uniformed army would wear the same outfits, there’s always weird outliers. A fun project can be identifying a unit, organisation or military body that had unusual colours, equipment or clothes and have a go at replicating them. Now, on the rare occasion that you do get nitpicked, you can just nitpick them back.
Event Accuracy
“I don’t want to recreate real battles all the time” is another common reason given for a lack of interest in historicals. But this one is basically just not an issue at all. Right, moving on..
Alright, I’ll elaborate a bit. Reenacting specific battles has been a pastime of historical wargamers for literal centuries, and it’s something that is still common in the hobby today. Some people aim to recreate a battle, individual soldier by soldier, with all the same terrain, movements, and strategies. Others want to reenact a specific campaign, approximating the exact forces but following the pattern of offensive and counter-offensive. Others generally want to make sure the forces are composed from factions that actually did fight, but are otherwise not too bothered about the specifics of where and when this battle might be happening, exactly.
But most people just show up and play games, to be quite honest.
This applies to some games more than others. I’ve never encountered anyone particularly interested in replicating a historical battle using SAGA or Chain of Command, for a few reasons. For one thing, battles of that size involved too few soldiers for there to reliably be detailed accounts – the majority of platoon scale skirmishes during WW2 would just be brief firefights following the chance encounter of two scout patrols, and nobody really remembers it. SAGA in particular is a game whose playerbase are so unconcerned with event accuracy that playing forces from two different Age of… supplements is common, with all the concern for history as Age of Empires 2 – Vikings vs Spartans and all that.
If you’re joining a campaign that’s based around a specific portion of war, there will probably be more of a concern as to what forces you bring to the table. If you’re playing the Napoleonic Peninsular Campaign, the Russians probably shouldn’t be showing up. However, plenty of campaigns are more permissive than you’d expect. I’m playing US forces for a Mediterranean Chain of Command campaign, even though US forces didn’t enter the theatre until after the campaign’s historical start date.
The main takeaway to be aware of is that while recreating actual events or wars is certainly something you can do if you want to, it’s very unlikely that anyone’s going to pressure you to do so if you want to just play casual pickup games.
Tonal Accuracy
This is an important area that I rarely see brought up when historicals players talk to others in the wargaming community, and counterintuitively it’s not actually about history at all. Wargaming rules are not works of academic history, they are games. And like any game, film or novel, they are attempting to communicate a set of themes. A vibe, if you will. This vibe can be “history as accurate as we can possibly make it”, but it usually isn’t, at least not in isolation.
SAGA is based around recreating the sort of epic tales that soldiers might tell each other round the campfire – it’s deliberately semi-mythologised in tone, so it really doesn’t matter if your force of Irish end up clashing with a warband from the Carolingian Empire. One or both sides are just exaggerating their exploits on the campaign trail as they sit around the campfire, drinking purloined rum and showing off to the new recruits. In SAGA, your Warlord is an epic hero of immense strength and presence. In actual history, your “warlord” was probably an inbred nob with an expensive suit of armour, who stands as far back as possible and tells squires to run over and order them to stop dying, please.
Bolt Action is a loose WW2 ruleset that is recreating the kind of heroic clashes you might see in Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers or Enemy at the Gates. Army lists are thrown together collections of cool stuff. Its mechanics do not really replicate actual WW2 infantry tactics or platoon organisation on anything but a very vague level. By contrast, Chain of Command has mechanics designed specifically to recreate actual fire-and-maneuver WW2 infantry tactics, and your platoon is built to an exact specification that recreates the structure you would actually have seen on the battlefield. To be clear, this is not a value judgement on either game. They are both valid ways to enjoy gaming this period of history, and which you prefer is entirely down to personal taste and priorities.
This applies to any period you might consider. Simple Napoleonics? Black Powder. Detailed Napoleonics? Soldiers of Napoleon. Medieval battles? Midgard or Nevermind the Billhooks. Ancients? Hail, Caesar! or L’Art de la Guerre. And if you want a fun, accuracy-lite ruleset for a wide range of pre-early modern periods, SAGA is always there.
Final Thoughts
Every historicals community is going to be slightly different. Some big clubs might have no annoying pedants at all, and some small clubs might be blighted by a couple (or vice-versa). However, while it’s impossible to make generalisations that account for every community, I am confident in saying that the majority of historical wargamers are simply nerdy enthusiasts who want to play cool games with neat little toy soldiers. It’s far more common, in my experience, for new converts to be met with a wave of encouragement rather than scorn, as we’re usually thrilled when someone makes the jump from the more fantastical to the historical. If you’ve always liked the vibes of a historical period, but have been holding off due to worries about getting bullied about uniform shades, let this be your green light, most likely it’ll be completely fine. Though people will probably make jokes about being annoyed by inaccuracies, because the idea of being genuinely upset about it is quite comedic.
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