--- title: "Wargame units are not characters" subtitle: "Managing 100 miniatures is easier than you think" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-03-02 08:00 date: 2025-03-02 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: mini-movement-trays.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [gaming, tip, meta, wargame ] --- In a wargame, you frequently have 20 or 30 or even 100 miniatures in your army. This can be confusing for a few reasons, not the least of which the sheer number of physical objects you have to keep track of. Each miniature generally gets to move and attack, and may also be subject to morale checks or other conditional effects. And then there's potentially the confusion over whether a miniature is behind cover, or has line of sight on its intended ranged target, and so on. I've been guilty of over-thinking this, to the point of making a game unplayable for myself. I have to remind myself of a few baseline rules of miniatures _en masse_, so I'm recording some of those reminders in this post for anyone who might find it helpful (especially my future self). ## Bases and base trays In many modern wargames, it's common to put exactly 1 miniature on 1 base. I don't know how this came about because I'm new to wargaming, but in historic wargames it's far more common to place lots of miniatures on a single big base because historically a group of soldiers remained in strict formation. Whatever the case, individual miniatures do allow for at least 2 benefits: 1. Greater flexibility when moving a unit of soldiers around the battlefield. Should your soldiers suddenly need to move single-file through a narrow alleyway or tunnel, you can arrange them as needed. 2. Skirmish games that focus on just a single unit from your army. Every time I've thought about combining my Hittites or Egyptians or Romans and Carthaginians onto big bases, I instantly get an itch to play a skirmish game with each miniature moving freely around a battlefield or dungeon. The obvious answer is [movement trays](https://battlekiwi.com/product-category/bases/skirmish-trays). You can slot several miniatures into a handy tray, and then move all those miniatures as a unit. I mostly use 5 slot trays, because in all the games I play the standard unit size is divisible by 5. Sometimes a unit of 5 or 10 is actually a unit of 4 or 9 plus a unit leader on a larger base than the rest. ## How a singular unit affects play That solves the problem of moving miniatures efficiently, but there's a psychological component. Sometimes, when you've got a lot of miniatures in a cluster, you can forget that in most wargames, those individual miniatures are treated as a _unit_, not as separate miniatures. Suppose you've got a unit of 10 soldiers rounding the corner of a building on the battlefield. Unfortunately, this exposes it to incoming gunfire. If you've moved the unit its maximum 6 inches (or whatever), and 1 of the 10 soldiers is still positioned behind the building corner, it does NOT mean (in most games I've played, anyway) that you only get 9 attacks. The unit has 10 soldiers in it, so it gets 10 attacks. Line of sight and cover is determined by the unit, not by individual. Once you start narrowing strategy down to each indidual miniature, you're playing a skirmish game, and you'd never play a skirmish game (by definition) with upwards of 20 miniatures! The same is true for damage. A soldier lagging awkwardly behind the building corner isn't exempt from taking damage. If the unit is hit, then it loses hit points. Unless the rules say otherwise, you usually don't have to remove soldiers from the frontline under the assumption that the bullets hit the soldiers at the front of the unit. You can remove a soldier from the back of the unit, which you might do for convenience or strategic reasons. It's vital to remember that the battlefield is supposed to be dynamic. The little people on the table are made of plastic, so it doesn't always look like it's in constant motion, but it would be a strange game world that literally froze in place every time a player needs to roll dice. Those imaginary soldiers are running and gunning, ducking behind cover and then back out to take a shot, dodging, weaving, parrying, and whatever else you do on a battlefield. That soldier behind the wall must have peeked out to take a shot. And unfortunately, that's when he took a bullet, too. Seeing the battlefield as a place in constant motion can save you from a lot of unnecessary (and un-fun) mental acrobatics. I used to agonise over whether a miniature was behind cover or not, and it was an argument I could never win. If I declared it did have cover because it was near an obstruction, then I felt I was cheating my opponent, and otherwise I felt I was cheating myself (and then it goes the other way round on my opponent's turn). Once you concede that these little toy soldiers are in constant motion for fear of their lives, you can accept that a miniature could well emerge from cover to take a shot, and also to be shot at. There may be penalties to its attack or a bonus to its defence, depending on the rules, but either way it's easier to see how the rule matches the visuals when you pretend your miniatures are living beings. (Hopefully that doesn't make them harder for you to pretend-kill!)

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