A difference of scale

Yesterday, the strangest thing happened to me in my hobbylife.

After years of pestering Duncan about the glory that is the 15mm scale where I finally gave in and simply stayed on course for 28mm; lo' and behold - there comes Duncan proclaiming that 15mm is now the new black and what a wonderful scale it is... just as I'm going into full 28mm mode for skirmish gaming.

Duncan's wonderful little team of 15mm space brigands

Long have I been an advocate for using 15mm miniatures for the larger battlegames, akin to Warhammer 40.000 and what not. You know, that weird middleground between platoon and company game scale where a lot of miniatures is needed on a large-ish table and bigger battles are fought.

Just like Fireteam Andromeda, which isn't so odd considering that I wrote it for that specific purpose, but there are also a host of other games out there and recently both Duncan and I became rather enamored with Jake Thornton's God of Battles. We had a quick and - very - small test game of it the other day and found it to be sound and just what we were looking for in that weird battle-scale of games for fantasy wargaming.

However. For that game, we could hardly scrape together two armies in 28mm! Having, both of us, not been much for painting the larger 28mm armies required for Warhammer and its ilk, none of us had enough miniatures! Well, not enough painted miniatures at the very least. We then decided that next month we would invest - heavily - in some 15mm fantasy miniatures so we could quickly paint up our armies and play a proper game of GOB... and of course, to have an excuse to purchase new shiny stuff!

Like these beauties right here! Soon... Oh yes, soon!

All fine and well, until Duncan had the notion that you could easily play skirmish games on a coffee table in this scale. And he's bloody right! And yet, there is something here that strike me as a bit wrong - on a personal level. While I can definitely see the merits of using 15mm miniatures for skirmish games, it just ends up feeling wrong to me; mostly because I already have this huge pile of painted 28mm miniatures lying around; I feel that 28mm still can deliver more character and that I can more easily identify, at a glance, what the miniatures are capable of by simply looking at them and not having to do weird basing schemes and so forth...

...And yet, the notion is there. Settling on a single scale for these things would really make things easier on my part as for making terrain and painting miniatures. It would also mean that my limited space for storage would only be taken up by a lot of thing that could be used for a single scale, unlike what I'm currently storing. While I can easily pick up some miniatures from my Fireteam Andromeda armies and play skirmish games with them, I still don't think that I'll enjoy it just as much as I would with 28mm skirmish games; simply because of the wealth of available miniatures in 28mm.

Ah well, idle musings to get this here blog going again - it's been a bit of a slog around here as I find that writing and posting and sharing these blogposts takes up too much of my hobby time and I'm still on the fence as to how to get it all organized and more steamlined for me so that I get to spend more time doing what I like; painting and playing with miniatures!