I have recently pivoted my historical wargaming focus from big battles in 6mm to skirmish-scale games in 15mm after I received much interest from my network of gaming friends about the latter… and continued crickets about the former!
I hesitate to lean too much on the “pike and shot” term for a skirmish context as there is not much space (conceptually and physically!) for blocks of pike and shot when you’re paying homage to the raids and skirmishes and street fighting that happened around the peripheries of armies on campaign and in battle.
My friends and I are busy grown ups with limited painting and playing availability. That said, we still want to get a game in once in a while without filling our vehicles to the brim with mini and terrain cases – and without spending half the game in the rule book trying to remember how combat works.
To that end, I’m attempting to build a fast-playing rule set that works well in smaller spaces (we’re trying 2×2″ as well as 2×3″) using 15mm figures multibased on 1.5″ rounds, so that you end up with warbands of roughly 11-30 figures on 4-12 bases. Add onto that a strong narrative element and rules that pay homage to the era rather than strictly recreate specific events (you could think of it similar in spirit to Bolt Action).
If you’re going for tabletop quality (as I’m not skilled enough to try much better!), then those sorts of numbers paint up very quickly… much more quickly than the 6mm big battle project I was laboring on!
I’m not much of a painter or photographer, but here are the progress photos of the initial, proof-of-concept warband of seven bases and twenty-one figures:
- Leader/Officer (one base)
- Skirmishers (two bases)
- Dogs (three bases)
- Cannon & Crew (one base)
I’ll also be cross-posting about this project to the Lead Adventure Forum, here.
[…] I first began the 15XX Renaissance skirmish wargame project a year ago last March, I originally had plans for a single-based “Character” unit. Officers, clergy, local […]