--- title: "The miniature modelling and LEGO connection" subtitle: "Surprising and unsurprising" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-03-28 08:00 date: 2025-03-28 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: lego-classic-space.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, wargame ] --- If you'd told me years ago that LEGO sets and wargaming modelling were in many ways the same hobby, I wouldn't have believed you. But a few years ago, a weird thing happened and I stumbled into wargaming, and I started building models and painting and playing the game, and yes, they're basically the same hobby. That might not be self-evident, especially if you haven't experienced both hobbies, but the similarities, both physical and mental, are there. I've got more experience with LEGO than wargaming. As a kid, I was a LEGO maniac. (That statement itself is a reference to my least favourite LEGO ad campaign, which is cruelly almost nostalgic now.) I'm talking classic Space (we just called it Space, then), Castles, Town, and later Pirates and Blacktron and classic Technic (including Technic mini figs, such as they were), and all that. Between us, we still own all our LEGO sets, from the first one I ever got to the ones I've purchased as an adult just a few years ago. As a kid, I wanted nothing but LEGO, ever. Unsurprisingly, I was obsessive about the hobby. My dad, brother, and I had our own proprietary system of organization and terminology for our LEGO sets. We sorted our bricks and pieces in fishing tackle boxes, and we kept all instruction booklets in an accordion-style file folder. I occasionally made time for a video game here and there, when I got access to a console or computer, and I even tried building a model plane and a model skeleton once. I didn't know anything about building "real" models, so I used the wrong glue and I was too impatient for the delicate work required. But also I didn't understand what you were supposed to _do_ with stuff that wasn't LEGO at the end of the build process. ## Building is playing After I'd built a LEGO set, whether it was from an instruction booklet or from my own imagination, I used what I'd built to tell myself, or probably my brother and myself, a story. It was loosely structured because we had no concept of how narratives worked. I almost wish some of our playtime could have been recorded, just so I could remember what happened during unstructured play. Looking back, it felt like we spent hours playing out variations of Star Wars and Star Trek and Ivahoe and Excalibur with our mini figs (well, we called them "LEGO men" back then, with "men" being a sort of catch-all term for nearly any action figure). But I wonder whether it was hours or just minutes. It seems odd, to an adult mind, that a whole day of playing with toys could be a mix of building and playing, with no start and no finish, with no goal or even a definition of what exactly we were doing. We were just _playing LEGO_, and we did that (whatever that was) for 2 decades. I still enjoy the process of building LEGO sets, but after buying my first set as an adult I realised I didn't know what to do with it once it had been built. I could absolutely use them as storytelling prompts. I could journal about what I'd built, and invent a story around it. Or I could put it on a shelf and admire it. Or I could make it into a game, or use it in a game. And all of those ideas sound a lot like what I do with wargaming miniatures now. I build tiny little Romans and Carthaginians, or Egyptians and Hattusians, or Warhammer, or wasteland dwellers, or whatever I want, and then I paint them. Once they're painted, I can set them on my desk and admire them every morning when I sit down to work, and they inspire flashes of story fragments that I can jot down for later or just enjoy as it plays out in my mind. And all of them are usable in either a board game or RPG or wargame. The lifecycle is exactly the same. What differences there are is due to maturity rather than what form the toy takes. As an adult, I have the concept of limited time in a day, so I tend to impose a structure on my hobby time. I can paint for an hour or 2, and then play a round of a game for an hour, and then craft something, and so on. ## Playing is building LEGO is brick laying, and model building is welding. The two physical acts are totally different from one another. With LEGO, you have a bunch of pieces, and you choose the brick you want to use to build anything you want. But with wargame models you buy parts of a defined model, and you pretty much have to build that model. Or at least, that's what I used to think, until I was introduced to _kitbashing_. As impossible as it may seem, there are lots of model builders out there that take the parts of different models, and stick them together to create something unique. It can be a pretty brutal process. Modellers cut chunks and slivers off of plastic pieces. They'll cut off the top of one model's head and use it as an eyeball for a monster, or a rivet on a war machine. And then where the head used to be, they'll glue on a spare power core from a laser gun and call it an android. It's a weird science, and it's liberating and inspiring. [Warhammer TV](http://warhammertv.com) has a whole show called **Scrap Demon** dedicated to the process. Every episode, four hobbyists take a set of 10 frames from random kits and assemble the parts into something entirely unique. I don't kitbash much, and when I do it's usually to make minor or rudimentary changes. I've swapped a head with another head, or an arm with a gun to make a cyborg. I added some guns and skulls onto a World War II tank to make it look like the Genestealer Cult had absconded with an Astra Militarum vehicle. I used some legs from a **Wargame Atlantic** kit so I could squeeze a few more Genestealer Cult models out of the Combat Patrol box I'd purchased. I converted the unused arm of an Imperial Knight (a battle mech) into infantry artillery. There's an art to it, and admittedly I don't think I'm exactly proficient with it yet, but it's fun to experiment. Even now I have plastic frames with spare pieces just waiting to be repurposed into some other model. Whether I'm building a kit from instructions, or I'm experimenting with bashing together parts that don't fit, it has occurred to me that I feel exactly the same as I feel when building LEGO sets. The tools are entirely different, but the process is basically the same. It's a weird mix of algorithmic precision and creativity. ## The benefits of structure The aimless freedom I had as a kid has a little nostalgia for me, but not much. Maybe it's just my poor memory, but I don't remember much about what I did with LEGO as a kid and I believe it's partly because there was no structure to what I did. Everything was cops-and-robbers back then, with no goals and no rules. It's dissolved into a sort of physical monotony in my memory, with very few moments standing apart from the rest. As an adult, moments are built in to my hobby. There are goals, and the feeling of accomplishment, and admiration for what other people are doing in their hobbies. It feels fulfilling. ## Build it your own way I still enjoy both LEGO and models kits. Until recently, I believed they were two completely different hobbies. Now I'm pretty sure they're exactly the same, and that feels comfortable.

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