Is Skirmish Wargaming dominating the hobby?

Moving to Crisis Protocol

over 45 years of watching (living thru) the evolution of this hobby.

there have always been both, large scale warfare and skirmish style games - for every genre.

while the quantity of either tends to ebb and flow with current trends. neither format is going away.

For me, it's all about figure cost. $85 for a single plastic mini is unaffordable for most of us. I'm fine, I'm old and have a LOT of original minis. New young people are in a world of pain now.

I only skirmish wargame. Cheaper entry. Faster games. Still great depth and choices.

Skirmish is on the rise because nobody wants to spend 12 hours on a tabletop game anymore

Houses in GB are getting smaller and a lot of people do not have the room to play large scale games any more, so smaller games are the natural solution.

Nah, there are plenty of "BIG" games out there for new starters to play. The games me and the lad are playing at the moment are Bolt Action in which you determine how big the game got. Titanicus, Team Yankee and sets I have but have yet to put together like the Epic range from Warlord, I have Waterloo, there is English Civil War, Punic Wars, and the impending release of the American War of Independance. All big game scenarios. I also have to say, I lament the loss of the 6' x 4' gaming mats, particularly in 40k. The whole point of an Eldar army was manoeuvre and no matter where you put a Wave Serpent on the board it could get you to the weakest flank and start dealing damage. Now a 1500 point game is packed into a tiny space where 4' x 4' shaves 8sq feet off the playing area.

The other observation I would make is that skirmish games are not necessarily easier to play. The rule sets can get very crunchy with the detail you have to work through. An example of this is the Bolt Action tank combat game in which you even include stat's for the crew of each tank.

Work pressure, less free time, more things to do... I understand completely the draw of skirmish games

Money is another factor. It's a lot easier to get a skirmish-size army on the table with one-two boxes of minis, but for a full-size list, you might need 2x-4x the number of boxes. I invested into SW Armada (RIP) and Legion, and with Armada being canceled, I'm weighing whether I can afford to jump into a second supported game (looking at Para Bellum's Conquest right now). It's nice to know that I can drop $100 and get started on the skirmish version, but then build that up into a standard-sized army if I find I really enjoy it.

Different time frame and aocial situations and, most importantly, marketing.
Before you went to an hobby shop to buy and play the game, while now is the norm to do that at home with kids or pals.
To accomodate to this situation, and to make the game a purchase for everyone, you need a smaller gaming surface that anyone can use on their kitchen table.
You need less model, to make it quicker to paint/assemble and to have more army to play with, to differentiate play.
And you need token, paper building and else to let the player have everything under control and reduce the optional purchase to the minimum.

That's basically what is happening now

As a 52 year old man, I really relate to what you said about wanting to paint less troops, have less set up time, and take up less table space. Several of my over 50 friends agree.

It's all about personal taste/interest. Many wargamers of my age, I am well into my 60's, started their hobbies over 50 years ago! The availability and range of figures were but a fraction of what is available today. Therefore, most are predominantly historical gamers, mainly because of those limitations. But, the main advantage to historical gaming over most other 'fictional genres' is that there is a vast range of miniature manufacturers in a wide range of figure sizes to choose from. Not only that, but in many cases, you are not limited by the 'created' backgrounds of those made up genres and not tied into buying just their miniatures. This also enables the historical wargamers' access to a whole range of rules available, in hard copy and electronic formats. Therefore those miniatures that have taken a chunk of one's budget to buy, prepare and paint, can be used again and again, using rules involving just a few figures a side to whole armies containing hundreds of even thousands of them! Plenty to contemplate for the would be acolyte about to venture into the realm of miniature table top gaming.
Also, on the subject of 'skirmish wargaming ', people like the late Donald Featherstone and others, were producing skirmish game rules well over 50 years ago! There is very little really new in the wargaming universe. Carry on gaming, everyone. And, enjoy, have fun, as one can fill a whole lifetime of enjoyment with it! 😉👍

I got started with WH Fantasy and was really disappointed when it was stopped for AOS. I really enjoyed pushing around the massive armies.
I do get the appeal of skirmish games as it is much easier to get started and the reduction it space needed.

Moonstone! This skirmish game deserves so much more love and attention

As a kid in the 70s started war gaming using two Roman Gladiators and a chess board with dice from whatever games we had around the house. Went from that to Donald Featherstone rules Historical Brigade sized actions, all sorts after that till drifted into Board gaming and nowadays mostly play ASL which is sort of Company Sized though you can stretch it to Battalion or Regimental. Anyone new to the hobby will find their way into it, get bored with some games, play others all their lives. To me its always been about playing what interests me and I hope there are other people who have the same want.

All of my gaming groups only concentrate on skirmish games. The Silver Bayonet, Port Royal, Hametsu, Devilry Afoot etc. I hadn’t considered that it was an age thing, but that may be a factor as I slip into my 50s.

I’m 57 and play almost exclusively skirmish-sized games. I didn’t hear you talk in the video about two of my biggest reasons to play skirmish: cost/investment and painting time. My group switches games pretty frequently and I like armies to actually be painted - I can manage that with 5-20 models in skirmish. It also means that when we change games I’ve usually only dropped $250-$400 on a game instead of the $1000s I put into Flames of War or 40k.

It's just way more affordable and realistic for young people as to what I've seen. A lot of us don't have the real estate to house larger armies so if we want to play we need to fit things into an apartment or a parent's house

Plus there's just a lot more things to engage with today so having complete and large-scale armies is a big ask when there's always something new and cool that fits your vibe and collection coming out

We need more dungeon crawlers. After getting into Maladum recently I don't think I'll be skirmish gaming for a while. It's so much more fun than just fighting each other all time.

The word "skirmish" has had a broad meaning in my experience. It seems to be applied to any combat game in which the miniatures are individually based, even if the figure technically represents 10 fighters. I've played in large "skirmish" games of "The Sword and the Flame" that featured over 200 figures. I'm currently playing "Pulp Alley" using "leagues" with as few as 3 figures, each representing an individual character rated for abilities specific to that character. The designer of "Pulp Alley," David Phipps, refers to it as a "skirmish" game. I call it a "role playing scale game." In any case, I recommend that new miniatures gamers start small, with games like "Pulp Alley," so as not to be intimidated by the amount of money and time commitment it takes to acquire and paint enough figures and terrain to get started.

Skirmish games have every reason to over take. I can't dedicate a 6x4 table and support tables for one or two games, but can set up 3ftx3ft in thirty minutes at worst.
Not to mention the logistics of anyone else transporting any or all of their respective collections.

Less time investment, less $$ investment, less work to go from an unopened box -> playing with a fully painted force, not to mention playable on even the smallest and humblest of dining room tables. The rules are always tight, easier to digest (NOT YOU, Infinity, though I love you still), and you can actually play and finish a game in a reasonable amount of time. Not to mention you can regularly play multiple skirmish systems across multiple settings without feeling overwhelmed both in your headspace and your literal actual space from storing the figures and terrain for it! Love to see it taking off, I yearn for the day it isn't just Kill Teams (A fine game, but quickly succumbed to GW rules bloat and their awful several-times-a-year seesaw balancing, but at least it's something).

Part of it is if you want to create something special with unusual rules, it will usually necessitate a smaller model count.

I'm working on a car combat game that focuses on the infantry riding on top, and my vision cannot work on a large scale without it losing focus and becoming about the cars.

Let me help you here: 2 kids, full time job, extra-curriculars on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, each child in a different part of the city.

God i hope so

Lots of baggage and wisdom comes with aging. Especially if you are sick of companies not respecting your time. Because as we all know, time is a resource we can never regain, so if a company doesn't respect it, then why give them patronage?
40K is a great example of a company not respecting your time. Not only does it take years to build/paint a 2k army, but after is all said and done, the game attached to it is naff. I am expected to adjust every three years, chasing some artificial obsolescence?
Nah. Nobody should even consider consenting to such a thing.
It's predatory.
Warcry on the other hand, takes up much less space in all aspects. Less cost, less space, less building, less painting.... and less time. Yet, more fun.
In fact, I can collect/build/paint/store numerous warbands for warcry, and still not equal the recommended amount of stuff needed for a 2K game for just my army. Likewise, my opponents never have to bring anything other than themselves to play. I couldn't do that for a larger wargame at 28ish mm scale. Nor would I want to.
If I want to play a huge mass battle game, then the obvious answer is to play microscale like Epic. It respects your time.
But we all knew this already back in the 90's, and so did the designers.
But greed got in the way, and so did our desire for shiny toys.
Prudence and experience has shown we mostly were mistaken to indulge such stupidity, and a course correction has been made en masse.
I have seen that most who still play 40K (though better rule sets result in higher player satisfaction), do so out of sunk cost fallacy at this point, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the mistake after so much cost and time was suck into a lackluster experience.
That's my TEDtalk.

Literally everything is easier with smaller scale games.
I've had as many epic memorable moments in skirmish games as in full wargames, I think ultimately memorable moments come down to bold plays being rewarded by the dice and the game system.

People have reduced attention spans. Cheers to mass battles!! - the way wargaming is meant to be.

for me it was unsustainable to have rounds of 4 plus hours to have like 10 minutes of effective fun gameplay, skirmish is the way for responsible healthy adults with families, also solo indie games are the best nowadays, things like 5 parsecs or County Road Z etc... I regret the hundreds of dollars I spent on GW's big games now that I know solo and skirmish games.

Nobody has time or money, then add to it that games like 40k change rules so often that you can't even paint an army before you find out your army got nerfed

I recently got into BLKOUT, and love it!! Also playing classic Battletech with few mechs per lance, all in solo mode.

Time is a factor. Skirmish are all i can fit in my schedule.

charging reasonable prices for mini without insane profit per purchase? nah
change the rules so people only use small amounts of minis so you can technically claim the game is cheap to get into? yeah

gw absolutely gutted the army sizes for age of sigmar to keep charging really high prices for their minis and dumbed down the rules to an insane extent to make it more "accessible" to players lol

Skirmish games are fun but it overbloated and doesnt seem to encourage a single company to make nice massive battle games.

Skirmish games also makes it easier/less expensive to have miniatures for multiple factions. I can’t imagine having multiple 40k size armies, but multiple skirmish warbands is def manageable. This is also important for me as often I am playing with people who are just starting the game, so having some options for them to play helps

As someone relatively new to the hobby of playing wargames, another contributing factor, imo, is that skirmish games are an in between for RPGs and wargames, and a lot of the people I know interested in wargames are also the people interested in RPGs. I'm choosing to look into skirmish games for the smaller unit counts and the unit customization, especially looking for games like Mordheim.

I think part of it is also the cost of housing. Having a smaller space on average means opting to choose games that take less space.

I don’t know. My first steps into the hobby were with Mordheim, about 30 years ago. I dabbled a bit with “big battles”, but they never interested me much. I enjoy the narrative and more focused approach of skirmish games. Nowadays I’m still playing Mordheim like games almost exclusively. 😅

I’m not sure I’d say skirmish games are less work. While it’s true they are easier to get on the table, you’ll likely add way more terrain, figure variety and often more bookkeeping (if they are campaign systems).

It’s a trap! While I currently also mainly play skirmish sized games with the excuse of having to paint less figures (I refuse to play with unpainted models 😊), I discovered that I now spend a huge amount of time on creating terrain. That’s one of the major requirements of skirmish games that they don’t warn you about. Filling a 3x3 Frostgrave table with terrain can be quite daunting and can increase setup time. Makes it also quite difficult if you need to go on location for a game. I often ressemble a moving company with all the stuff I need to carry along for a game. I don’t have any stores in my area that cater for wargaming (large or skirmish) and have decent terrain. As a consequence we mainly play at (friends) home which then has an impact on the size of games to play (unless they have a dedicated wargaming room, which is a minority)

Skirmish gaming is more reflective of modern warfare and how its represented in the media. Small, elite units. If theres a narrative campaign then im all for skirmish. If there isn't then i want yo draw battle lines, and i dont want to fight for an objective, i want to annihilate my opponent... With questionable tactics 😂

Btw battletech was an awesome game.

Siply put, army games are just not viable for anything other than historical wargaming today. And that's because the stewards of this kind of gaming, the major publishers, aren't giving people the environment necessary to support such games anymore.

As someone who likes that kind of large scale, massive model count game, we didn't build armies over a month or two to get in on the new meta that dropped. We built armies over decades. You look at the people who built those massive DBA, or Warhammer Fantasy Battles, or Rogue Trader armies, they didn't do it over a year. They did it over several years, sometimes over twenty or even thirty years.

In terms of hobbies, building a wargame army is not like building a skirmish force; it is more akin to building a model train layout. You build it over a long, long period of time. You put together one of those old Warhammer Fantasy Battles regiments, or a Roman cohort, or a Norman regiment of men at arms, that's an big investment of time and money. We're talking a minimum of twenty models, and maybe upwards of thirty, forty, or even a hundred. Creating a fighting force for an army-level wargame is a labor of love. But even love has its limits.

See, the tabletop scene is just too unstable right now to invest much time in army-level games. The scales are too unstable. The rules are too unstable. The availability is too unstable. The only way such games are feasible is if we have some really good reason to think that the regiments we are building today are going to be viable five years, ten years--perhaps even forty years--into the future. That means consistent scales. That means consistent rules. That means consistent setting and lore. That means consistent availability, either from the warehouse, or from the aftermarket, or from the used market.

Game Workshop, Catalyst Games Lab, and pretty much every big name in the hobby isn't so interested in providing the kind of stewardship that make large games viable. They keep on messing with their scales, messing with their footprints, messing with their lores, and messing with their rules to sell new product, make their old product obsolete, and other such things. That's not a good environment for big, army-level gamers. That might be fine for skirmish-level gamers, roleplayers, and collectors, but I need more guarantees.

Economic factors play HEAVILY into it. Gaming stores are vanishing in some parts of the world (thanks to online shopping virtually eliminating FLGS); you don't always have places to play big scale battles like we once did in the 90's and even the early 00's. Someone mentioned here that houses are expensive, so people are stuck playing in apartments (where rent is also rising) and many still in my generation or younger are still living at home or have lots of roommates because it's just so expensive to have property.

There's also the fact that wargaming is EXPENSIVE. GW price creep used to be a meme, but everyone is raising prices now. Buying a box set is as expensive as car insurance. That isn't to say skirmish gaming isn't expensive--sometimes it can be just as expensive (especially if you want to do a lot of kitbashing). But it's definitely more accessible to a lot more people.

And to be fair, large scale tabletop games are still popular--Warhammer: The Old World is a good example. And those games exist for those who want to engage with them. Napoleonic wargaming is MASSIVE as well. That isn't going anywhere. If anything, it seems to surprisingly be gaining speed. And that's alongside skirmish games like The Silver Bayonet, Sharp Practice, and Chosen Men to name a few. So don't fret yet!

I really do see the appeal of skirmish games - a quick and easy game that can be had in one evening. Some can even be played a few times over in a single evening. But... for myself at least, there is something that draws me into the more epic scale battles (Armoured Clash is currently on my list).

As a modeller, mainly, who has a curiosity and passing interest in wargaming as break from my main hobbies I don't have the time, space or enthusiasm for army level games. Skirmish level games are much easier to fit into my life and a few have crossed the threshold required to invest time and money in for particular reasons. Burrows and Badgers is on the dark side of cute and Michael's miniatures are a joy to paint. I got my 2e book at Salute 52 where they were sold out by mid afternoon. Five Leagues From The Borderlands is great because of the fantasy setting, narrative campaigns and solo play not requiring arranging with other players. The other one I have is Judge Dredd because, well, it's JD!

In these times, skirmish gaming makes a lot of sense economically. Spending the time and money on a mass battle scale system is a young man's game, probably a rich one.

Time is the biggest thing with any form of table top gaming how much ca you give?
I have star wars shatter point haven't played yet and pledged to 1490 Doom

I think we need to accept that the hobby is fragmented into many silos.
The presenter reels of a long list of popular skirmish games.
I have only heard of two of them, the two "big skirmish" ones.

This means our impressions of "the hobby" are based on very limited samples.

I play skirmish games with friends. They do seem to be appearing quite regularly. Of course it's a speedy process to paint 12-20 figures I assemble a force.

Now tastes vary, but I'd estimate that a good 80% of those skirmish games are played once or twice.
For us there's too little variety in play.
Either hide and shoot, or all pile into the big central scrum.

I can't help thinking that many of these rules are hurriedly written and barely tested. Particularly considering how often a high-powered individual rules the game.

There are some great skirmishes: I'll happily recommend Frostgrave, Pulp Alley and also Devilry Afoot.
I might also argue that The anal rules Nimitz are a skirmish considering the figure count.

But I like a mixed diet. Interesting g skirmishes, mass battles and a bit of Role playing game ( for times when a skirmish is just too big and impersonal).

Back for another thought. Figure size.

Doing a big battle with 28mms figures is a real effort.
You typically struggle to manoeuvre more than four units on a British dining table.

When I do big battles I use 10mms or 6mms figures.
The table has room for 12-16 units per army.
And the units actually resemble formations.

But let's return to our own gaming echo chambers.
It's difficult for a newcomer at a shop or online to avoid the impression that there is only 28mm.
Once 28mms is established as standard, limits of space and cost drive the newcomer toward skirmish.

As I have grown older, I just have less time to paint and play. Painting 20 minis is a lot easier than 100 and you can take your time with them too.

I’m someone who enjoys painting, and so I gave up 40k about 7 years ago and really got into skirmish games. Never looked back apart from one foray into Legion. Sold that to get into Shatterpoint and I’m loving it. 8–12 models for a squad/crew is my ideal game.