Musings of a Green Man

The miniature gaming hobby is old. The original Dungeons and Dragons came out 45 years ago. The first tabletop wargame is far, far older. Even if we ignore games like Chess and Go, which could be considered wargames, because they are played using set pieces, and on a set board, early, commercially available, variable wargames have been around since the late 18th century, the first commonly credited being introduced in 1780. That's nearly 240 years. With this long history, games have come and gone, scales have shifted, design ethoses have changed, and so on. Most gamers have fond memories of the first games they played, the first miniatures they bought and built and painted. When we first encountered the hobby, everything was new, games were so much better than the disorganised play we knew as children, miniatures seemed so detailed. Essentially, for those of us who stayed in the hobby, we fell in love with one or more aspect of the hobby. As lovers, it's all too easy to view...

It's something that we can almost take for granted, but scale is somewhat key to miniature based hobbies, and is something that, as a designer making terrain, is a major headache at work. Conventional model design has a fairly straightforward approach to scale. If you buy a kit that's 1:72, you can be fairly sure that the model will be 1/72 the size of the original. If you tried fitting a 1:35 rifle to a figure therein, however, it looks ridiculously oversized, since it's nearly twice the size it should be. Scale gets a little more complicated when we get into railway modelling. At the core of model railways is the track. Of all elements in such a set-up, the track is the most mass-produced component. Tracks, in real life, however are far from universal in dimensions, with different gauges in Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and the Nordic nations, to give a small selection. To deal with this, either the modeller has to accept that the Flying Scotsman couldn't be use...