Making Compact Wargames for Travel
I’m 19 years into my Naval career, heading on a downhill slope toward retirement at 20. Even so, I find myself looking for ways that, should I be deployed, I can carry on the hobbies I love. I collect small RPGs, getting them in physical form, or printing them off at Staples to hold onto, and I find myself looking regularly at compact wargames, and figuring out how to make them even more compact.
That’s what I want to look at today. If you’re a military member, or just a world traveler, and need to carry your wargames with you, there’s an easy way to do it. You can have an entire game in your hands in a binder, and today I’m going to show you how.
The Game System
To begin, let’s choose a game. I’m a big fan of Mordheim and its small model counts, and that can easily be printed off since the game is dead. Check out Broheim for the rulebooks on that. It’s a great rule-system, and easy to find opponents, because there’s a lot of Mordheim players out there who haven’t played in 20 years.
You can also check out One Page Rules, particularly their skirmish rules. Age of Fantasy Skirmish and Grimdark Future Firefight are great options. They have an expansion if you want a Necromunda-style game, too. You can also play their ship-based game, Grimdark Future: Warfleets. Jumping ahead just a little, OPR has ships you can print out, which lay flat, meant for Warfleets, so I’d check those out from their store there for those.
Other rules include Space Weirdos, which requires very few minis and a small table space. They also have a fantasy version, Sword Weirdos.
Print off your preferred ruleset, and put it in a binder.
Miniatures
OkumArts, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
I absolutely love OkumArts Minis. Basically, ANY game you would want to play, Okum’s got them. I highly recommend them. You can easily run Any of the games listed above only using his minis. They’re high quality, gorgeous minis, in a fun cartoony style.
You can also check out the paper minis One Page Rules have created, they’re all very nice too, and also come in black and white, so you can take colored pencils along on your trip and feel like you’re painting minis.
I also really like AntoHammer, Mayhem in Paper, and you can find a lot of random stuff at OneMonk Miniatures.
What you’re going to do, is buy 16-pocket sleeves for mini cards, which you’ll place your cut out minis into. You can use the 9-pocket sleeves for larger minis.
For basing, you can either print out your own bases from One Monk, or you can go check out Litko, who have great acrylic bases meant for paper minis. Throw those in a small card box, and you can attach and remove your minis to your heart’s content.
Now your binder should include both the rules and the minis you need to play.
The Terrain
This one’s trickier: How do you get some terrain that can be broken down easily? There is plenty of paper terrain out there, but not a lot that can go into a binder.
Firstly, OnePageRules, in each of their paper army bundles, has terrain. The walls in that are easily dropped into the 9-pocket sleeves I pointed out earlier. They also have some boxed shape terrain that you could flatten out and put into full-page sleeves. You’d probably want to have some tape on hand for each time you stand up the terrain to keep it in place.
FoldScapes has a patreon where you can get a TON of pop-up terrain. You can drop those buildings into full-size sleeves to go in your binder too. I highly recommend those. He’s got a video here showing how to build them.
OkumArts has a ton of fold-flat terrain as well in the following sets:
Darkfast Dungeons Advanced Set 3d Walls
Darkfast Classic Fantasy Set 16
Retro Space Set 10 Space Station
Spot of Bother Set 2 Top Secret Headquarters
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With that, you’re good to go! If you’re traveling quickly without a lot of preparation, you can just throw all this into your cart at Staples and get it all printed quickly within a day. You’ll then just need to take along an Xacto knife, glue sticks, some superglue, a metal ruler, and maybe some tape for your trip, and build it all in the field. If you have some time to do so, you can get it all assembled and thrown in a binder before you go. I’m considering putting together three binders myself, using OnePageRules rulebooks. Let me know if you do the same!
