Budget Wargaming Part Deux

For more on elcheapo Wargaming, read on! This was amassed by a good friend of mine.

Papermau is a great and diverse website for building paper models. Buildings, vehicles, and other terrain items are available.
Freewargamesrules Wiki
 

Freewargamesrules Wiki

Photos: I was a soldier (an extra) in the movie “Love is Never Silent.”

Bringing free rules to the Wargaming Community since 1997. All the miniature rules featured on this site are free…

has hundreds of rules sets covering any conceivable period, ranging from homebrew to gaming companies’ products.
Junior General Home Page 
Junior General Home Page

Promoting the use of historical simulations as a tool for teaching history. Free resources anyone can use.

has lots of paper soldier resources, again covering a vast array of figures.
The awesome BoardGamerGeek website very often has rules, summaries, quick reference sheets and other resources for an incredible amount of tabletop wargames in addition to boardgames.

BoardGameGeek | Gaming Unplugged Since 2000
 

BoardGameGeek | Gaming Unplugged Since 2000

 

I also advocate joining or starting a club. A-Z Gaming members pay monthly dues and has used the collected funds to buy lots of cool terrain that would be far out of reach of individual members. We have an alarming amount of professionally-made terrain that makes the tabletops look great!

Having a club that is recognized with some kind of web presence helps you to gain access to game support from game manufacturers, with starter kits, freebies, and tournament prize support.

If a club is not an option, then sharing purchases with friends helps to soften the blow. Splitting a boxed set of a game and taking one faction each also divides the shipping costs.
On the topic of reducing shipping costs, many shops offer free or reduced shipping for large purchases. Again, the amount is often beyond the budget of a single gamer but entirely reasonable for three or more people ordering at the same time. Leverage your buying power.
Onward!

Hakone, Japan, in the shadow of Fuji

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Near Hakone, views of Mount Fuji, and near Only Yu Hot Spring!

And did we mention the reasonable price?

Romantic Fuji Views near Hot Spring

Minamiashigara-shi, Kanagawa-ken, Japan

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Budget Wargaming

This hobby can be very expensive to say the least. Especially if you play GW Games. How can we keep costs down for both table top miniatures Games and board wargames?

Self made model of Mount Fuji, total cost: $3.00

A good friend pointed out that by buying figures at eBay or other auctions, the figs are only cheap if they ship from your country.

The gentleman at the Budgethammer Blog recommended a search like this for GW figures in order to get the best deals:

warhammer -bowl -rings -white -epic

He says:

“Firstly, it cancels out a number of words that tend to clog up Warhammer searches that I’m not personally interested in. “-bowl” gets rid of any Blood Bowl minis (I love Blood Bowl, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t like the old GW models and there’s a surprising amount of it on eBay), without hiding any Blood Angels stuff. “-rings” hide Lord of the Rings stuff, again of which there is a lot of. “-white” hides the Warhammer magazine, White Dwarf, and “-epic” hides all the Epic 40,000 stuff.
The search is set to ignore all Auctions and only display Buy It Now options. It hides all Business accounts/shops, only displaying Private sellers. Lastly, it orders it by Most Recently Listed.”

Ian Dickie in his book, “Wargaming on a Budget,” discusses things like:

“He offers sound practical advice on buying and building your armies (should you opt for metal, plastic, or even card, and in which scale?), gaming tables, terrain, buildings and even storage solutions. As well as purely financial constraints, Iain Dickie also recognizes the fact that available space is another major restriction for many gamers and tackles this issue too. Now you’ve got no excuse not to get wargaming!”

Photo: I played Captain Morgan in a promotion in Canada.

Indeed choosing plastic over metal, or a smaller scale such as 2mm over 28mm, both of these will save you money.

Irregular Miniatures is one of the cheapest if not the cheapest producer of metal miniatures. GW is perhaps the most expensive. Going for 20 mm soft plastic miniatures makes our hobby very cheap indeed.

The Wargamer online magazine has more ideas on keeping wargame costs down.

Rules:

There`s a plethora of free rules available for miniatures play from all periods.  Just do a web search for “free wargame rules,”  or “free table top miniatures rules,” something like that.  Many rule sets have been a labour of love by their author, and have been play tested over many years with friends and relatives.  Some of the free rules are actually better than the rules which are rushed out to make publishing deadlines by the major companies.  And frankly, the rules are what make or break the game.

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