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Exploring the short-lived D&D Chainmail skirmish game, an expensive looking product launch that flamed out after only two years.

Oh man, I'm low key obsessed with those models. It launched right when I started in the hobby, and I painted some of the Orc/goblin faction. It's in that weird zone where 99% of the ebay listings are optimistic buy it now lots, but they actually sell for pretty reasonable prices when people do auctions.

They had some nice minis and I picked some up back in the day. Another of the sculpts got copied in the prepainted plastic minis game that replaced it.

One of my friends routinely fields a gnoll archer and a battle axe toting ogre from that product line. Nice miniatures.

My favs were the dwarven female with axe and shield (used her for my paladin) and the half dragon sorcerer.

Thoroughly enjoyed playing Chainmail and still have some of my stuff. Good to see some chatter about it.

I've read Gary Gygax's Chaninmail (uses d6's only), along with: Swords & Sorcery (0e D&D mass combat rules); 1e BattleSystem (1e AD&D's mass battles rules system); 2e BattleSystem (2e AD&D's mass battles rules system); and 2e BattleSystem Skirmishes (2e AD&D RPG-lite, miniatures based game, with simplified combat rules which speed combat up by a factor of 10, or more). I've played 2e BS with friends, since 1993; I've played 2e BS Skirmishes since around 2004. Both are really fun, open ended for customization of units and troop types.

I have never played Chainmail -- Gary's version, nor WotC's version. There was a progression reading all of the previous miniatures games offered by Guidon Games (publishers of Gary's Chainmail rules, prior to the formation of TSR) and TSR (Gary's former company which published 0e through 2e D&D rules): they started out being very detailed, sluggish, and not terribly fun to read, let alone play (IMO), until I reached the 2e mass battle game rules: combat is streamlined, being based loosely upon the RPG rules; it is a bucket-o-dice game, which has its own attractions for me.

How does WotC's Chainmail play? Does it try to replicate.as many features of 3.x RPG combat rules as possible, or does it streamline them? 2e BS Skirmishes reduces a figure to one Hit Point per Level/Hit Die, with non-Fighters getting fewer Hits based on their <d10 Hit Dice. Every successful Hit, inflicts 1 Hit Point, so even a 15 HP Fighter of 15th level, won't last too many rounds of combat, and neither will most monsters! It abstracts the combat, simplifying it, tremendously, thereby horrendously speeding up combat resolution. It allows players to retain the full role playing aspects, as desired -- it just emphasizes the use of miniatures and terrain, at the role playing table.

What is WotC's Chainmail take on gaming? Is it more miniatures focused, simplifying combat, or does it attempt to retain all, or most of, the nuances of the 3.x RPG rules while focusing on miniatures and terrain?

None of the TSR/WotC miniatures games really got a lot of support from their companies, nor did they sell well to RPG gamers. Sad, really. The two BS games I play, are really quite good, quite fun to play. Cheers!

I love this range of miniatures.Been tracking them down over the Years to get a full set of releases.
The Gnoll sculpts are great.
The books they did are very nice too.They have some wonderful terrain in them.

Last year my FLGS was having a sale getting rid of stuff that had been sitting around for awhile. Some of that stock was some old Blisters for this Chainmail game. Managed to pick up a few blisters for 3 dollars each, but out of all of them this is the only one I managed to get painted



They are all absolutely lovely sculpts and this one is by far my favourite. I've been trying to get all the Gnolls and a few others for D&D as well as other skirmish games. One thing to not is a lot of the designs used in this release were reused for the D&D Miniature game that came out in 3rd Edition.

I liked the Gnolls from that set as well.