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There is a massive push towards promotion of skirmish scale games. When I say skirmish scale I mean low model-count, not games that utilize "skirmish formation".

This year alone we've seen pretty much every major come out with a skirmish ruleset, and things like Shadespire are being pushed hard to attract tournament players. Company-scale and army-scale games seem to be dwindling where I am at, with the common sited attraction points being:

* skirmish games are cheaper because you only need a few models
* skirmish games are faster to paint because only need a few models
* skirmish games are faster to play because only need a few models
* skirmish games don't need as much space because only need a few models

XWing of course is massively huge. Armada, based on the same IP but involving larger scale battles with the big ships, does not do so well... largely cited because you need more models and its more expensive.

Even the 40k games around me are coming down in points now, and games like Infinity are starting to blow up their population because... only need a few models.

I kind of liken it to standing on the edge of a drying out pond in the middle of the desert. You can watch the water evaporate before your very eyes and the player pool for company and army scale games seems to be getting smaller and smaller.

Are we at the end of the line for those types of games, save for a niche that will occupy the same ranks as historical players in myth and legend?

Generally cheaper to get into, faster to play and with less of a storage requirement? Hard to see why these sorts of games are becoming more popular.

I read in a games mag a few years ago that a trader said the era of selling big armies is over but you still see companys selling large armies...so not totally the case.

 auticus wrote:
* skirmish games are cheaper because you only need a few models

Or not. The models tend to be more expensive then.

Now if you want something cheap go for like 6mm and warmaster ancient or similar ruleset.

eh. You can play infinity with less than $200. You can play shadespire with $60. You can play XWing for less than $200.

There are some games that cost a lot per model, but the popular ones right now don't really cost very much to play or get into.

I think it has more to do with the speed at which the games can be played as much as anything. Sure, there are many reasons as to why a certain game will be successful while others fail (entry price, aesthetics, gameplay, community, support, et al.), but in this day and age of instant gratification and social media, people are generally wanting something that fits that mindset. I don't know if pre-painted models are something that can help or hinder a wargame, but they fit into the attitude of quick-to-play and getting the game started and done quick. I mean, X-wing has been doing remarkably well, but from my anecdotal reading, it has reached its peak as it continues to draw from the old Expanded Universe.

Yes, the Star Wars games are going to be successful no matter what, because it's Star Wars. So many people have a Pavlovian response to at least try anything related to Star Wars (including myself, budget pending). There aren't that many other IPs that have the same clout and presence as Star Wars.

I've found that Skirmish games, while easy to get into and generally cheaper, tend to have a much higher turnover when it comes to playerbase. I've played Malifaux, Infinity, Monsterpocalypse, Guild Ball, Frostgrave, Shadow War Armageddon, and Bushido in the years that I've also played 40k, and while all the preceding games I've mostly sold and moved on from due to the playerbase drying up after a few months/sometimes a year or two, 40k has stayed constant and I feel I've gotten the most value out of those miniatures.

I think mass battles will always have their place. It's hard to beat the spectacle of them and there are aspects of them you simply cannot replicate with skirmish.

That said, I have a bag that barely fits my 2 lists for Warmachine night. I have another bag exactly half that size that contains my armies for 5-6 other systems. I simply don't have the free time to paint up whole units anymore where adding a model or two to other games here and there is a lot more doable.

It's one of many reasons, but I actually think terrain is really hitting larger scale games hard. You CAN play them with significant terrain, but in general they don't reward dynamic tables the way skirmish games do, and those dynamic tables draw in players in a way that the armies themselves don't for some reason.

I'm definitely more in the skirmish camp lately, but I don't see big games going away entirely. They have their place; they're just now facing some significant competition.

If anything, this is a plus for large-scale gamers. I enjoy games of every size. My Old West game is skirmish and I love me some Mordheim. I'll play X-Wing but don't like it enough to buy in.

The problem with skirmish games is that - if you enjoy wargaming spectacle - the terrain costs are inversely high. My Old West game may feature 5-7 models per side...but this is the kind of table I run it on:



There's nothing "cheap" about a heavily terrained skirmish game. Same thing goes for my Mordheim boards...



Can you skirmish cheaper? Absolutely. I do think skirmish games are fantastic - it's nice to be able to play a lot of games and just paint 20-30-40 miniatures etc. I like everything from Skirmish and up. I even play 1 vs.1 gladiator combat (and yes I've been fighting the urge to build a huge gladiator arena for those two miniatures on the table...)

Mass battle games are a tough sell because our society is generally much more spastic and ADD than before (with more ways to entertain ourselves at a moment's notice). There is a large sub-culture who loves them, but as a business prospect it's occasionally a tough sell.

I agree with Elbows,
Sirmish gaming the way I do it requires a not-insignificant investment in terrain. However, that's lessened alot by the fact that my terrain sets see use over a variety of games. Here's the table for our recent Walking Dead game. Except for the GM's who controlled the groups of zombies, each of 4 players only had a maximum of 3 minis.


Also, we should define what we mean by "Skirmish" games. Personally I think of things in terms of:

-Skirmish- smaller than Platoon size
-Platoon- 15 to 30 figs. Games with 2 platoons I'd still call platoon game.
-Company- 80 to 150 figs, many folks would call this "mass battle".

Added to this, the effort and cost required are quite dependent on the scale of the game. 6/10/15mm are much easier scales for running Company battles, but gamers rasied on GW (and I count myself as one of these) seem to have a tough time moving outside of 28mm figures.

I grant that there aren't many popular Company level games in the 28mm sci-fi and fantasy realm, but there never really have been. 40k is about as big as ever and we lost WHFB, but gained KoW. On the Historical front Bolt Action and FoW seem to be going strong and of course there's a multitude of other smaller-distribution games catering to historical gamers who like big games.

At the same time we're seeing lots of skimish games, but this also isn't terribly different from the gaming scene as it has always been. Maybe kickstarter is resulting in more of them, but there have always been alot of skirmish games appearing and disappearing from the market.

the most fun I've had playing a mini game was the Marvel miniatures game while it was still being produced. Teams consist of 4-5 characters that are randomly activated and all have special abilities. It was great to see heros and villians acting like they would in universe and the play was so simple, fun, and quick, it's hard to see why anyone wouldnt want to play a game like that.

compare that to 40k where you spend years+ painting an army to play and then an additional 45mins setting up only for your opponent to have the exact counter and the game be completely moot.

The issue I have with mass games these days is they're kind of dull to build & paint. Far, far too often in a game like 40K or AoS the "best" lists feature multiple repeats of the same unit, and some armies are entirely built around the idea of big blobs of homogeneous infantry.

So, sure, I could force myself into "Job Mode" and force my way to the end with a tolerable finished army, and reasonably expect to get a lot of games with it.

Or, I could invest the same money into half a dozen skirmish warbands with 5-20 figures each or a new table's worth of terrain and spend any time from "lost" opportunities to play to enjoy modelling and converting loads of figures.

It's not an attention span thing or whatever the latest version of "nyeee them thar youths today dunno how good they gottit daaaagnabbit!" is, I still prefer "clunky" and "old" games like Mordheim & Necromunda over flashy "modern" twenty minute deckbuilders or boargames that happen to use miniatures for counters, it's just a matter of looking for the way to extract the most possible joy from my hobby budget, and for me that's variety and the chance to model loads of cool things more than it is ensuring I get a game in as often as possible.

I'll be happy to collect mass-battle games again, when the companies who own the IPs I care about figure out that they should be played in a saner model scale.

I'm kind of sad that mass-battle games are dying, if true.

I'm a treadhead, and I think company scale and above is where you have to play to use tanks.

Unlike Yodhrin, as well, I like uniformity. I think part of the appeal of armies is the uniformity and discipline. Each individual soldier in the Thin Red Line probably looked the same at tabletop scale - any given Spartan at Thermopylae probably the same. The imagery of "serried ranks of bayonets" or "the Soviet armoured phalanxes of late World War II" are awesome, but do not evoke individuality or creativity to me.

I think of the whole army as a single character made up of component parts, like a D&D character. As the armies get smaller, it becomes harder to blend each model into the whole, and you end up with each squad being a character, than each guy being a character, and fundamentally you could conceivably play a game where you have one character - like D&D.

I hope mass-battle games at company scale and above stick around. There's something neat about reading "3rd Regiment of Foot held the line at X battle" that gives me a sense of prideful comraderie (or something) that saying "George killed Bill during this tiny raid" doesn't.

I have no issue with uniformity in an absolute sense, merely with the amount of effort it requires in the context of 28mm heroic games.

A 6mm or 10mm unit is highly uniform AND easy/quick to paint, you can do most of an army to tabletop standard in the time it takes you to do a single 40K unit with a similar technique.

Basically if a miniature is big enough that I have to paint eyeballs and pupils, it's too big for a mass-battle game where I have to build & paint a hundred or more virtually identical versions of them, when instead I could have painted multiple skirmish warbands with a lot more variety. IMO anyway.

 Yodhrin wrote:
I have no issue with uniformity in an absolute sense, merely with the amount of effort it requires in the context of 28mm heroic games.

A 6mm or 10mm unit is highly uniform AND easy/quick to paint, you can do most of an army to tabletop standard in the time it takes you to do a single 40K unit with a similar technique.

Basically if a miniature is big enough that I have to paint eyeballs and pupils, it's too big for a mass-battle game where I have to build & paint a hundred or more virtually identical versions of them. IMO anyway.

Ah, fair enough.

I suppose, as a treadhead, that painting tanks is easy enough that it doesn't bother me. A whole army "unit" is one model, so it takes about as long, haha.

I think 40k does it right by having a lot of unique equipment and characters on the field, but then kind of shoots itself in the foot by not having mechanics that reward a wide variety of weapons and instead rewards an optimal 400ish points of models copy pasted 5x.

 Elbows wrote:
If anything, this is a plus for large-scale gamers. I enjoy games of every size. My Old West game is skirmish and I love me some Mordheim. I'll play X-Wing but don't like it enough to buy in.

The problem with skirmish games is that - if you enjoy wargaming spectacle - the terrain costs are inversely high. My Old West game may feature 5-7 models per side...but this is the kind of table I run it on:

Spoiler:

There's nothing "cheap" about a heavily terrained skirmish game. Same thing goes for my Mordheim boards...

Spoiler:

Can you skirmish cheaper? Absolutely. I do think skirmish games are fantastic - it's nice to be able to play a lot of games and just paint 20-30-40 miniatures etc. I like everything from Skirmish and up. I even play 1 vs.1 gladiator combat (and yes I've been fighting the urge to build a huge gladiator arena for those two miniatures on the table...)

Mass battle games are a tough sell because our society is generally much more spastic and ADD than before (with more ways to entertain ourselves at a moment's notice). There is a large sub-culture who loves them, but as a business prospect it's occasionally a tough sell.

perfectly stated

I have a $800~ Dropzone Commander table - and both my DZC armies fit into a box the size of a Space Marine Landraider. 20-30 models a side - but with 15+ large terrain structures and extra terrain required to play.

I don't think big army games are dead, just look at how popular the new 40K is. But I do see Skirmish games being a lot more popular and getting even more popular just because the lower model count and lower investment makes it easier for new players to get into it, and easier for new companies to produce so there will be a lot more variety out there with a much smaller investment.

Like all things, there is a pendulum in the market. I expect that soon the reaction to "skirmish games" everywhere will be a return to Mass Battle and Ranks & Flanks games. It just might be another 5-10 years or so.

My club of mainly older gamers plays mostly 28mm mass battle games. From my perspective there are a few reasons that stop me from buying in.

It takes me large amount of time to paint the army.
It can be quite expensive to buy the army depending on the material and how the company prices it's models.
Many of the mass battle games we play require a large amount of space. We normally use a 10x6 foot table for them and it regularly gets so crowded you can't do anything except just move forward. If I ever move or the club closes down there won't be a guarantee of finding that much table space again.
Some club members have such large armies I don't feel like starting.
I've bought into a few of the mid sized games like Gates of Antares that didn't take off and I feel very unhappy about the amount of time and money I wasted on that. I don't feel the same way about the skirmish games that didn't take off.

I still like big battles and I've become a lot more enthusiastic about smaller scales recently, 15mm being my preferred choice. It's quicker to paint, can be cheaper (Some plastic 28mm have a similar cost per model) and lets you use a smaller table or have a lot more room for manoeuvring. For anything more than a skirmish game in 28mm I have a 40k army that sees use so I can stick with that.

Some mass battles games are getting smaller as well. This is my army for L'art de la Guerre and is around 25-50% smaller than a similar army in older rulesets like Fields of Glory.

A similar thing has happened in many hobbies. In RPGs, for example, its becoming more and more common for campaigns to last 6 months or less, where in the 70's and 80's, they lasted years.

Part of the change is access to instant gratification pasttimes like video games, movies, TV and other "quickly consumed" pasttimes. Because of the glut of available activities, people are spending less time with any one activity at a given time.

People aren't spending all day on one massive tabletop battle in a day, they're playing several 1-hour games with smaller forces - or playing one game before they break off to go play Magic, get on their X-Box One or go binge Stranger Things. Our time is more fractured than it was ten or even twenty years ago, and dedication to single all-day activities has become the rarity instead of the norm.

Skirmish scale games are certainly more popular at the moment but they're not going to kill off the big army games for a couple of reasons

1.New Shiney Syndrome:

One of the reasons that large scale games hold onto their players is that people have invested significant amounts of time/money/effort in getting set to play, so they say loyal far more than players of a skirmish game where you can dump when something new comes along so they tend to have more stable communities and so attract more new players, skirmish games are much riskier as they burn hot briefly and then fade out

2. OMG most of our players own everything (they want):

Skirmish games tend to grow in size with every new version of the rules as companies want to keep selling stuff but after their initial burst of growth has happened find players are less interested in buying more stuff unless there's a reason to, so game size tends to rise

(resculpting is the other antidote to this but can fall flat unless the new is clearly better than the old)

Large battle games using large scale minatures generally are not used outside of games where a minature represents more than one actual trooper.
Where the size the unit takes up on the table is more important than the individual minatures in the unit.

Eg in ancient /Napolenic type games, including WHB, and KoW.

40k started as a skirmish game.And went to a large skirmish game in 2nd ed.
The large battle size game was covered by Epic game s in 10mm,(A more appropriate size for 'Apocalypse type,' large battle game.)

But GW has been preoccupied with selling minatures over game play issues.
So 40k and WHFB became focused on supporting 'minature collectors', at the expense of 'gamers'.

And this is why 40k is actually the only , 1 to 1 scale large battle game using 28mm minatures .

Skirmish game with large minatures makes sense.Large battle games with scaled down ratios or minatures make sense.

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
Skirmish scale games are certainly more popular at the moment but they're not going to kill off the big army games for a couple of reasons

1.New Shiney Syndrome:

One of the reasons that large scale games hold onto their players is that people have invested significant amounts of time/money/effort in getting set to play, so they say loyal far more than players of a skirmish game where you can dump when something new comes along so they tend to have more stable communities and so attract more new players, skirmish games are much riskier as they burn hot briefly and then fade out

2. OMG most of our players own everything (they want):

Skirmish games tend to grow in size with every new version of the rules as companies want to keep selling stuff but after their initial burst of growth has happened find players are less interested in buying more stuff unless there's a reason to, so game size tends to rise

(resculpting is the other antidote to this but can fall flat unless the new is clearly better than the old)

Pretty much this.

One of the concerns I've long had regarding X-Wing is just how much life there is to that game. Sooner or later, their continued releases are going to feel watered down, unless they rely on gimmicks. That's a natural hazard of such a small scale game.

40k, AoS etc? Less so. Because they can be played at a variety of points, you can do Skirmish level, or you can ramp it up to Apocalypse level. Games still more or less function regardless (compare to Warmahordes, where the 2D6 for attacks nixes batch rolling. Not a flaw of design, just a limitation on scale)..

Skirmish games are pretty popular at the moment. But one need only glance at GW's recent financials to see it's not necessarily at the cost of larger scale rule sets.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Let's also keep sight of the mercenary factor here.

Games With Few Models Are Cheap To Produce. Which means they have an appeal to games companies of all sizes. So naturally, they're going to make up a larger slice of the market offerings than games where you need armies.

I know a big part of the appeal for skirmish for me is the painting opportunity. With skirmish games I'm able to spend more time on an individual figure and try to improve my skills in a way that I'm not likely to attempt if I'm painting dozens of figures. It also lets me bounce between systems, which gives me opportunities to try new color schemes and generally keeps me from getting bored with painting.

One of my great loves of Shadespire right now is simply that I've wanted to paint up some Stormcast for a while and that little group scratched that itch nicely. I've also REALLY wanted to paint up some Orks so tomorrow is going to be a good day. Now if they would just get around to releasing some Sylvaneth, I might be able to totally get AoS models out of my system.

Certainly in my gaming circle space is the big limiting factor. Despite all being middle aged professionals none of us own the kind of house that could fit an 8' x 5' table and 4ft square has become the norm. That means smaller games of 40K, Bolt Action or large skirmish games such as the Rampant series are our ideal size of game. We still play mass battle games but only in 6mm on a 3' x 2' board. If only there was a 6mm version of 40K...

I would say no, only because it's my experience that people will gravitate towrds what is played, with few if any deviation. My area, for example, is dominated entirely by 40k now. Warmahordes was quietly killed off, AOS has dropped, games like Infinity or Malifaux are maybe someone heard of it but it's not stocked or played, more obscure games like Dark Age are completely unheard of and even mentioning it would get a roll of the eyes if not outright hostility for "pushing a pet game". My area tends to prefer larger points, not smaller, because they can't field all of the big toys they typically want to put in. I've been trying to encourage like 1000-1500 points as the default, but am meeting with a ton of resistance because "2k is the norm" and because people are unwilling to drop things from their list.

I think that overall large scale games might be on the decline, but it is entirely dependent on communities and most communities will be completely ignorant of games that they can't just pick up from a shop and that have a regular game night. A lot of these upcoming skirmish level games are obscure third party games that don't have backing to make any traction at all, and most communities I've seen are completely unwilling to try something that somebody found online, even if it has a company behind it.

That is very true. People are going to play what everyone else is playing, regardless of quality of rules or models.

Because finding opponents is probably the #1 concern for many if not most people (if you lean towards the gamist side of the hobby)

It's been interesting to see how much impact Hearthstone has had on the industry. I think that passive opportunity it creates to turn it on, find an opponent setup has put a lot of pressure on the tabletop industry.

Difficult to prove one way or the other large army-scale games are on the decline ... or on the increase for that matter. What happens at your LGS and even at wargaming clubs doesn't necessarily tell the whole story

So this is an opinion.

In my view large scale mass battle games have never been in a better place. But they very often take place in a different space to GW and skirmish level games. They are often situated around closed (or at least private) groups, who don't play at their LGS, and don't play tournaments either. I live in a city of around 2 million souls, over the last 30 years all the guys I know in the community are all still playing and collecting for large scale battles, and they have gradually added to their numbers.

Will you see them in your LGS? Probably not (unless they are dropping in for paint etc). But are they there? You bet.

Dakka is predominately about 40K, but you only need to visit a site like TMP to see how healthy things are in historical large scale gaming. The hobby's in a really good place right now.

The rise of cheap plastic kits has had a massive impact on that side of the hobby. Companies like Victrix, Perry and Warlord are regularly producing plastic kits of fantastic quality. They wouldn't be doing so if the market wasn't growing. Makes building large armies affordable. I can build a Napoleonic or ancient army with 350 models in it, for the same price I can buy a 40K army with 50.

Sure it takes a special kind of lunatic to sit down to paint 300 Napoleonic Austrian line infantry, but there's plenty of those lunatics still around.