Is cost really an issue for 54mm gaming?

I remember the excitement of walking into the dealer area at Cold Wars years ago and finding bags of BMC ACW figures US$5 for about 50 figures! A little crude perhaps but they painted up well!

Finances have often been an issue for me, given other lifestyle choices and no matter how long I drooled over the Soldier Pac listings and dreamed, armies of the size I wanted seemed remote. Then I saw Frank Chadwick's 4 figure 54mm units for his Volley & Bayonet rules so I started playing V&B with small units. Then I got into home casting. With companies like Miniature Molds on the west coast and Dunken in Texas selling copies of old Britain's, Authenticast,Imrie Risley, Mard and others as well as Dunken's Lil Army not to mention Prince August's lines as well as the growing flood of new plastics, full sized armies became cheaper than the latest 25/28's. I went back to a dozen 24 man units a side on a 6x10 table.

Times change and I no longer have room for a big table and all those shelves but having been introduced to Morschauser by a friend in 2002, I was drawn back to small, 1 stand units but still wanted a bigger table to make the terrain feel at home which in turn suggested lots of units. Then Bob Cordery caught my imagination with his Portable Wargame and I'm still "recovering" from that idea.

At this point I am willing to maintain that a very attractive and enjoyable game can be fought on a dining table size say 4'x4' up to 4'x6' (Mine own wargame room table is 4'x5' with an extension to 4'x7' in the making) if using either skirmish rules with a handful of figures or any number of rules where the number of figures in a unit is not counted whether Bob's rules, my own,  Black Powder, DBA, Armati etc.  or with rules like Ken's ATKM's rules. Just takes a bit of imagination and an open mind, especially when designing terrain.

Ross
gameofmonth.blogspot.ca/

I think DBA/Armati has a lot of potential for small table size, low figure count per army therefore, in plastic at least pretty cheap. In fact you could be encouraged to buy multiple armies.

For WW11 a few boxes of Tamiya 1/35's and you've got one hell of a skirmish game, potential to be very eye catching!
Napoleonic rules such as Grand Armee, who says you need 1000's of 6mm figures crammed on a 3" square base, when a few 54mm plastic or metals (mounted like mini dioramas for extra bling factor) could do the same job, and have just as fun a game.

However I also in my minds eye see a large section of my garden filled with seven years war types, marching over the mole hills, even in plastic this dream may always remain so, although in my madder moments I'm to be found considering sculpting and moulding my own, as I haven't seen anything commercially quite what I'm looking for...good job too according to the Mrs!

The 'About Caesar/Cromwell/Napoleon' rules by Dirk Donvil look great although I have yet to play them. I have seen Dirk's large 54mm games and the 4 mounted/8 foot sized units do look good.

I'm collecting Little Legion Zulu War figures and yes they are costly (although at the cheaper end of pre-painted metal 54mms). However, all my other periods are plastic and they are still cheaper to buy per figure than most 25/28mm figures.

Space can be an issue although if your 54mm units are say half the size of 'standard' 28mm units perhaps it all evens itself out in the end. There is no way round the fact that true scale 54mm terrain can be enormous, which is why I use true scale 28mm terrain instead. It still looks right on the table as non-54mm gamers at our club have told me.

Cheers
Anthony

Anthony and I also played Battlecry using small units of 54mm figures with 28mm true scale hills and trees on a hex mat (a custom made mat with larger hexes). The game flowed fast and worked well visually, the table looked like a proper old school toy soldier game (think Bob Bard or Morschauser) sadly we didn't take any photos.