Wargaming on Smaller Tables

This article began as a look at playing Horizon Wars: Zero Dark on smaller tables but, as I thought more about the subject, I realized that there was room to look both wider and deeper at the subject and consider options for all kinds of games and how to play them with less space available - or just in different ways, to keep them engaging and entertaining beyond the norm.

A Question of Scale

The obvious starting place is to look at the scale of the miniatures in-hand. If you normally play a 28-32mm miniatures game on a 4'x6' table, then you could reasonably play the same game in 15mm on a 2'x3' table. A certain degree of measurement adjustment is needed, but either halving measurements or switching centimetres for inches will usually be enough without straining anyone's brains.

Since "epic scale" became a thing in the Warhammer world there have been many attempts at creating 6mm "travel" versions of a variety of Games Workshop games, including Warhammer 40,000, Necromunda and Inquisitors amongst others.

But this does throw up the problem of actually owning miniatures in the right scale. For a one-off battle, it's usually enough for one person to own all the miniatures. But if you want to make it a more regular feature of your gaming experience, you are relying on people being prepared to own miniatures for a single game in two two separate scales, and that's a pretty long ask. I'm not saying it can't be done (I'm sure it has!), but it's not an option you would want to rely on.

The more pressing issue is one of visibility. And this has two angles to it. The first is from the point of view of the player who relies on being able to clearly see aspects of the opponent's miniatures to guide tactical decisions. If that soldier is carrying a heat ray, then this armoured squad wants to keep its distance. I that character is armed with a chainblade, then that's going to shift the odds of a close combat distinctly in its favour. Etc. When you drop the scale - and make compromises with miniatures collections - it becomes harder to immediately understand the risks on the tabletop at a glance.

The second angle on this one, though, is from the perspective of the designer. Generally, when we write games, we write them with specific miniatures or, at least, specific categories of miniature in mind. Sure, you can play Zero Dark with 6mm minis, but you're going to find aspects of the game technically a bit fiddly. And your immersion is probably going to suffer. There's a reason that character-focused, narrative-heavy games tend to start at 28mm and work upwards. Immersion in the experience of individual characters is stronger, imo, when the miniatures are larger (I think there's a point at which this stops being true, btw, but that's a topic for another day).

So altering your scale to small minis to play on a smaller space is definitely an option. You can drop from 28mm to 15mm to halve your playing space, or from 15mm to 6mm to halve it again - a game that normally plays on a 4'x4' table can be played on a 1'x1' table. But this approach has some serious obstacles and isn't going to work for everyone.

Vertical Integration

Who doesn't love a bit of business bullshit? But in this case, we're not talking about restructuring the IT department, but about using terrain to create a smaller playing space that offers the same challenges as a larger one - specifically by going upwards.

In Zero Dark and similar skirmish games, like Deadzone or Infinity, there are rules for ladders, staircases, climbing etc. And those rules are there for a reason - to let your character interact with the verticality of the playing space. But in practice, we often don't bother. In most skirmish games, there is a sense of urgency that is core to the game, and as that urgency is built upon an assumed playing space size, whether it's 4x4 or 3x3 or whatever, you may find that you don't have much time to really explore the vertical space in a meaningful way when you've got to get to point A as quickly as possible to do the thing.

But if you reduce that playing space size, suddenly you've got more time to explore the vertical. In some ways, this is simply moving from 2d to 3d thinking - creating a volume that offers the same amount of playing space as the surface you usually use. If you imagine your playing space as having a mixture of flat an vertical areas, you'll see that your space has a finite playable volume. If you reduce its surface area but increase its verticality, you can achieve the same playable volume in a smaller table area.

Of course, it's important, then, to make sure that the verticality is important to the game. Objectives need to go upwards (or, indeed, downwards). If you put the characters and the objectives in the same plane of reference, they'll just find ways to circumvent the verticality entirely and your terrain-building efforts will go to waste.

Older wargamers probably remember the amazing vertical playing space made by the GW studio for Necromunda, which has been replicated many times online since then. But this is a great illustration. The total table space occupied by such terrain could be as small as 1'x1', whilst reaching up (with the right stability at the bottom!) to as high as 3 or 4 feet from the tabletop.

Climate Crisis

No, I'm not getting political again (yet). I'm talking about a different option which is perhaps more practical than expecting people to find, build or own large amounts of vertically-oriented terrain.

We often default to the simplest version of a game's manifold options, but many (most?) skirmish and even battle-level games include rules for environmental terrain, from fog to marshes, to minefields, to dense forests, to magma plains, to arctic crevasses. And it's very easy to gloss over these and focus on the core gaming experience. But if a large part of the reason we need tables of a certain size is because of the urgency in moving from A to B or the ease with which we can draw a line from this gun to that target, then we can use the existing terrain mechanics to mess with that.

Smoke, fog or just low light conditions can reduce ranges. Whilst boggy, dangerous or magical terrain can reduce the speeds of movement. Suddenly players will have to re-think how they get from A to B when a straight line is just inviting catastrophe. If you have to move via C, D an E, with various obstacles to negotiate along the way, and with little opportunity to draw a clear line of sight to the enemy (which would, of course, just encourage players to bunker down and have a firefight) then you have the ability to compress your table substantially.

There's probably a limit to how far this kind of measure can compress a table. I tend to think it stops at 2'x2' for any game with a 15mm scale or larger. But it's a very cost-effective approach when you can just say "it's the middle of the night!" without needing to do anything else to the table. Or throw down some cut-out felt patches to say "bog", or "minefield".

And, of course, you can double the bang for your buck by combining this option with the aforementioned vertical integration.

Mechanical Difficulties

The last option is to exploit the mechanics of your game to create new obstacles that will make smaller tables more viable. The exact approach you take will depend, of course, upon your game, but there are generally categories of mechanic you can look at and mess with.

In Zero Dark, I have deliberately given players a lot of tools they can mess with to create a more obstacle-laden game that would make a smaller playing surface more viable. The big ones are the control deck and the complications table. Making the Red Force more active or more dangerous will tend to slow teams down (or just kill them really quickly - it's like going from Adept level on Skyrim to Legendary). But creating a custom complications table would have a similar effect - especially if you shifted the odds and had complications appear on a Joker or an ace, or just added more Jokers to the control deck.

Mission Critical

Perhaps the best option - from my perspective, at least - is to write yourself new missions that are specifically designed for smaller table areas. Rather than "Got to A and do X", you could have "Got to A, do X, then go to B and do Y, then go to C and do Z". On a larger table, such a mission might consume too much time and make completing it impossible, but staging it on a smaller table will make it a more achievable objective.

And, of course, combining a dedicated "small table" mission with vertically-integrated terrain and some climate crises is entirely doable to make your miniatures wargames increasingly playable on small spaces.

I hope this was a useful article. If you've got ideas that I've not touched upon, or if this has sparked some ideas that you are inspired to put into effect, do let me know in the comments.