Heretical Gaming is my blog about my gaming life, featuring small skirmishes and big battles from many historical periods (and some in the mythic past or the far future too). The focus is on battle reports using a wide variety of rules, with the occasional rules review, book review and odd musing about the gaming and history. Most of the battles use 6mm-sized figures and vehicles, but occasionally 15mm and 28mm figures appear too.

Sunday 11 May 2014

Looking For An Opportunity Inside The Problem...

There have been a few real-life changes in my life recently, the two affecting the gaming being that I have a new job and  I have lost the use of the room I used for gaming.  Unfortunately I am now going to struggle to get use the 5' x 5' set-up I have been for lots of my gaming over the last couple of years, including the bigger battles in my Peninsular War campaign.  I can't at the moment think of an alternative location capable of fitting in a table of the same size, so I'm having to do a bit of re-thinking of my gaming, specifically how to gear my games to using a smaller table, probably a maximum of 5' x 3' or so.

Now I have no problem playing smaller games; in many ways they bring at least the equal in enjoyment.  But I think there is a problem when it comes to campaigning.  Although (almost) anything can be done as a one-off, but I think that my normal gaming table will have to cope with the vast majority of the battles played upon it and that becomes a fairly hard maximum of what figures you can put on the table, or you have to make a good workaround about how you scale the forces to fit the table with a reasonable troop density.  The 5' width implies to me a maximum of about 25 'elements' of my 6mm figures which I guess isn't too bad, but the 3' depth will have to be carefully managed.  If I stick with my campaign and using the Polemos rules to fight the battles, then I may start using single 60mm x 30mm bases rather than two butted together to make the recommended 60mm x 60mm brigade base to allow more units in the shallower depth of battlefield. The 'average' area feature generated by the terrain chart should then become 240mm x 120mm rather than 240mm x 240mm as well.  Alternatively, I may just play different types of games whilst this situation exists - more Grant and Asquith scenarios and  Tabletop Teasers perhaps?