William's Wargames

Prince August produce some really nice 40mm semi-flat figure moulds, for home producing whitemetal figures in a very ‘retro’ style:

Though looking brilliant, there’s a very high upfront cost to this, though:

• A Mould/Metal Set: https://shop.princeaugust.ie/ultimate-seven-years-war-mould-gift-kit-pa123100ug/
• Supplementary Moulds:
  • Dragoon Moulds: https://shop.princeaugust.ie/pa3126-seven-years-war-dragoons-40mm-mould-set/
  • Opposing force infantry moulds i.e. French (£55)
  • Artillery Moulds (£47)
• A Casting Kit (Additional Clamps, Ladle, etc.): https://shop.princeaugust.ie/starter-casting-equipment-kit-2000/, and a Melting Pot: https://shop.princeaugust.ie/solder-melting-pot/

This comes to around £320 and comes with enough metal to cast around 50 infantry figures.

Potential Army compositions

If one were to play a ‘One Hour Wargames’ game (one of my favourites – check the modifications here) then one needs to field an army of 6 of 10 possible units: four units of infantry, two of skirmisher (equivalents), two of artillery, and two of cavalry – assuming 16 figures per infantry unit and 8 for cavalry.

cost of armies

According to Prince August, each bar of metal can cast 5 infantry figures or 2.5 cavalry/artillery pieces. , then we can work backwards from a standard unit size to understand the overall cost.

Based on the unit sizes above, one needs around 35 bars of metal atop the initial casting set – around £165 – to complete the armies.

One ends up with around 20 units/185 figures for approximately £480 or around £2.60 per figure.

Compare this to my other gold standard, Pendraken – a per-figure cost isn’t comparing apples-to-apples, but one would need to spend around £250 for the equivalent army in terms of base/unit size. I guess the question is whether one wants to see this:

Or this:

Space Considerations

Of course, the use of 40mm figures over 10mm does have an impact when it comes to space. There’s not much chance of fitting a 40mm-scale star fort on the tabletop

It would appear that PA figures are typically mounted on 20mm frontage bases, so four bases of 2×2 infantry or 2×1 cavalry would make up a unit, giving a frontage of equal to my 10mm scale standard basing – the difference being that the Pendraken unit would consist of 40 infantry instead of 16!

For my Napoleonics I used 2mm figures, each on a 1″x1″ base – so about half the frontage of the proposed PA 40mm units. I was able to play some fairly large battles on my 3×3 board, so on the assumption I can stretch to the use of a dining table instead of a fold-out card table, that should be sufficient.

Of course, movement and firing ranges become a whole deal more abstracted as you go up in scale, but if my experience with naval wargaming has told me anything, it’s that dead scale gaming isn’t actually that brilliant?

We’ll see!