One Scale to Rule them All

I have a problem. It’s not quite all consuming, yet… but I am finding myself more and more drawn to a philosophical conundrum that I’m afraid will never resolve itself in my mind.

That conundrum? I want to find my “Goldilocks” scale in miniature wargames. I am primarily a painter, and will more likely than not drop a smoke bomb and disappear into the ether if confronted with an actual game. So, the age-old adage that smaller (than GW) scaled minis won’t work for me doesn’t quite apply. I really don’t mind if most of the people I hang out with in the hobby sphere only game in Heroic 28mm scale, since I hardly play games in the first place!

Lately, the thought of smaller scale miniatures has been really appealing to me. They take up a lot less space, and there are plenty of options out there to fill out just about any genre for a collection. Sure, I can’t really put together an Age of Sigmar list from most of the options out there, but I can do plenty of fantasy stuff!

Now, the biggest question ends up being which scale works for me? With that in mind, I worked on four dwarf minis in different scales:

From left to right we have a 10mm, 15mm, and 20mm Dwarf from Forest Dragon Miniatures. The stalwart chap on the right is a standard GW Beardie Boy, which I have a metric butt-load of at the moment.

The classic Heroic 28s look great, have tons of detail, and are a lot of fun to paint. But they DO take up a bit of space, and they take some time to paint up, especially if you’re putting together regiment sized collections of figs.

20mm minis had me pretty pumped up for about a week, since they translate to roughly 72nd scale in models there are a lot of cool scenery and terrain options, just not much for fantasy. They also paint up a bit faster than the 28mm figs, but not so much faster that they have a clear advantage. Also, while taking up less room than the GW figs, it’s not that much less room!

Now, I have to be really honest right now. I’m already a sucker for 15mm, which you can see above. They’re small enough that they don’t take up much space, terrain is also pretty small, but they’re still big enough that they have a good amount of detail! Plus, they paint up pretty quickly because of the size. Downsides are that they are small enough that I’m concerned about eye strain, but at least I’ll go blind doing something constuctive!

the less said about 10mm the better, this scale broke my brain. Cool as hell to see put together in a battalion, but at 55 my eyes and hands just aren’t up to that challenge. I might come back to it later, because it’s really tempting from a storage perspective, but I did not enjoy the experience one bit!

My personal favorite after all of this comes down to 15mm! There’s a ton of options available, and I just love how a group of troops looks massed together. This group of Dwarf hunters would work well for just about any skirmish game, and I’ll be back in a bit with some tips on how to put together a group for rank and flank games!

What’s your favorite scale to work with? Let me know in the comments!