--- title: "Build an army for a wargame" subtitle: "Rules of engagement" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-04-02 08:00 date: 2025-04-02 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: just-a-typical-roman-egyptian-army.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: gaming tag: [ gaming, wargame ] --- Popular wargames like **Warhammer** and **Frostgrave** and **Deadzone** have specially designed miniatures for them. This allows rulebooks to refer to a specific and exact miniature, alleviating any confusion about what size that model is meant to be, what uniform it's meant to be wearing, what weapons it should be carrying, and so on. You can look up an army in the rulebook, buy a box of the miniatures corresponding to the army you want to play, and you're ready to go. The vast majority of wargames, however, don't have a line of specialty miniatures. For most wargames, you refer to a rulebook to find out what kind of armies the rules cover, and then you buy miniatures that you think fits the description. With great power comes great responsibility, and sometimes it can be pretty overwhelming to understand what a rulebook requires you to have in order to deploy a valid army. In this article, I step through the process of building an army for a wargame that has no official line of miniatures. ## 1. Obtain the rulebook If you're going to play a game, you need to know the rules, and most wargames provide rules in a rulebook. Almost without exception, a wargame rulebook contains the steps you need to engage in combat with an enemy army, and what kind of soldiers, weapons, and vehicles or mounts you can deploy on the battlefield. In the context of building an army, the rules for combat mostly don't matter. However, knowing the rules can influence what kind of army you choose to build. For example, suppose a game has extensive rules for archers and swordsmen. If the archery rules are boring to you, then you might choose to build an army focused on melee. If the dueling rules seem boring to you, though, you might instead build a mostly ranged army. In practise, I find that you don't really know what's exciting or boring until you've played, so I usually just use my intuition of what I typically find fun (it's usually based on how "clean" I feel the rules are). This doesn't always result in the most strategically sound army list, but as long as I'm having fun I consider it a win. ## 2. Read the army roles In addition to combat rules, a wargame rulebook (and sometimes supplementary material) lists all possible units within a valid army. Each unit represents 1 or more miniature you'll put on the battlefield. Each unit also has attributes or stats to determine what kind of dice roll means they're successful when they attack. A rifle, for example, probably hits harder than a pistol, so a unit of riflemen would use lower or higher target numbers (whether low numbers or high numbers are better, of course, depends on the rules). An infantry unit might be 10 soldiers, each one armed with either a pistol or rifle. But a tank unit is more likely just 1 vehicle. An important commanding officer is also likely just 1 miniature because, after all, there's only 1 commanding officer. There are usually restrictions on what you're allowed to put into one battle company. You're probably allowed only one commanding officer, probably because the commanding officer has special rules to make it more powerful than the average rank-and-file soldier. Maybe you can only have 2 tanks, to prevent all players from fielding literally nothing but tanks. You may only be allowed so many cavalry units, and there's probably an upper limit on how many infantry troops you can recruit. Some rulebooks use a Points system, in which each unit "costs" a certain number of Points. As you add units to your army, you add its Points to your total. How many Points you can have in your army depends entirely on you and your opponent. If you and your opponent agree to bring 500 Point armies to the table, then that's the limit. But if you and your opponent agree to bring 1000 Point armies to the table, then that's the limit. And so on. The descriptions of unit types provided by your rulebook is essentially the ingredient list you can use to build an army. Look through the units and select the ones you want, keeping within the restrictions of the rulebook (Points or number of units or whatever). Write it down on paper (the rulebook might have a roster sheet in the back). I find it helpful to also include the unit's stats on my roster. They're printed in the book, and re-writing is redundant, but it helps me internalise the numbers and special abilities associated with each unit. Besides, having it on one sheet means I have all the data about my army in one convenient place during the game. ## 3. Buy miniatures Once you've got your army as a paper list, you can safely purchase miniatures that satisfactorily match the unit description. Because the wargame you're playing doesn't have its own miniature range, this can be surprisingly complex. There are some obvious armies (Napoleon, World War 1, World War 2) that are easy to find across many miniature companies. But others are rare. You might have a hard time finding an Ptolemaic Egyptian army, for instance, but you could probably make a good argument that a Roman Republic army (painted in some unique colour scheme) would probably be close enough. Others just don't exactly exist, because science fiction and fantasy armies are fictional, so you just have to find miniatures that feel right to you. It's either part of the creative process or, if you hate shopping like I do, it's torture that you can't wait to be over. Whatever your feelings on hunting down just the right miniatures for your dream army, you want to buy miniatures that fit the units in your army as closely as possible. Wargames are at their best when they're _what you see is what you get_. When you're dealing with 20 or 30 or 60 miniatures, or even just 8 honestly, being able to look identify a miniature's abilities at a glance is a really big deal. It's just not fun to look at an approaching unit of swordsmen and scoff at their measly 5+ hit rolls, only to remember the moment they're attacking you that your opponent _did_ warn you at the start of the game that they're actually meant to be spearmen with 3+ hits and reach. It's not always possible to get an exact match, but it's a courtesy to your opponent and to yourself to try your best to get a really close match. Can't find a soldier with a flame thrower? Use a soldier with a rifle, and either attach a miniature fuel tank to it, or paint the muzzle orange, or at the very least paint the rims of the bases fire red! ## Play the game After you've got all your miniatures, you probably have to assemble and paint them, and then you can go to war. It's important, I think, to keep in mind that everything I've described in this post is _part of the game_. Once you've got a rulebook and you decide to build an army, you're playing the game! A wargame is all of the steps: building an army list, assembling models, painting them, deploying them on the game table, and maybe even upgrading them (if your game has campaign rules). It's all part of the hobby, and the fact that it takes weeks or months, and then lasts for the rest of your life, is why it's so fun.