---
title: "006 Wargames 2: Money is object ? (eng)"
date: 2025-12-28
layout: post
---
Last post was about me finding a path to start wargames in a fast but satisfying way, making cut where I can and keep the good parts. I made myself some clear objectives to stay on track as best as possible but apparently still wasn't enough. I still have a required amount of minis creeping in on one side with the "Space Station Zero" prospect or something that look like too much of a ruleset to bring randos up to it with "Stargrave".

My manifest in 5 parts is still a really good starting point that I intend to follow as its sorting a lot of things just by staying true to it. I present it to you in english here so you could adapt it for you, just by modifying the parts in bold to your liking.

## The wargame starter manifest
1. I'll use only rulesets or minis that fits a **sci-fi** universe
2. To ease us the access to the gameplay and don't worry that much about about either competitiveness nor interpretation of the rules, I'll use only **solo/coop-able** rulesets
3. Only players will have plastic minis, ennemies will be **printed paper standees**
4. Environments for the game may be **random stuff that I find in my appartment** or at best paper/cardboard cuts
5. I keep my choice of ruleset to be **the most miniature agnostic possible** so that even in 5+ years I may still use them for new games
6. (bonus) It need to fit my table... No OPR Grimdark Future Firefight for me. 😭 It would have made everything so easy...

These criterias are helping me a lot to narrow down what is strictly necesssary to actually start playing in the nearest future, while being the provider of everything. Obviously also focusing on skirmish games to limit the minis required.

I have to say that no one of the wargaming hobby from Youtube talk about how difficult it is to start wargames while staying in miniature agnostic territories, most of them probably started with Warhammer and already had quite a collection by the time they dabbled in other more confidential games, sometimes with games made specifically to repurpose the Warhammer minis. As for me I try my best to stay in games enjoyable for beginners and streamlined rulesets along with all-purpose minis at decent prices (both sprues and STLs), and this proves to be an incredibly challenging tasks. I don't have any sense of how a terrain should be set, how important is the size of the table, what constitute a good balancing of armies, and the list goes on. I'm going blind and never learned any of these in Warhammer...

## The Golden start ?
Now onto finding this one good ruleset that fit my bill, most recently I'm sort of leaning toward [Space Weirdos](https://www.wargamevault.com/en/product/359157/space-weirdos) because it's pretty much truly miniature agnostic as almost all minis will work as we can specs them how we want. What I mean by that is that the minis would decide their specs, instead of the rules asking for specific type of minis. So far, so good, except it's originally a versus game, with a solo addon (good), but no coop existing to my knowledge, sadly. Maybe someone, somewhere already made one but I've yet to find it.

Now it mustn't be that hard to hack one, if there is solo we're just a few tweaks away to have coop.
And this is where I try to find these tweaks that won't make any sense without the official ruleset but:

Just after a quick look of the rules I'd guess to play the "Objectively normal scenario" we'd need a 3'x3' table with approximatively 60 points warbands for each players against ennemies doing a double reinforcement each round but rolling 1d20-1 to scale them a little lower to accomodate for the smaller warbands...
A "kill'em'all" scenario could work even easier with the same table and warbands against equal enemies points with no enemy reinforcement (as it should).

Coop may not need much more that this but these are wild guesses and only playtesting will tell if that work or if more tweaks are needed. And this is where it get scary because as with most wargamers, it's already hard to bring people around a table but playing a wonky ass game won't help on that front... Obviously testing in solo (along with two handed solo) should help but to my own despair I have a really hard time playing alone...

Anyway I'll have to start somewhere, I suppose. I'm still currently painting some minis of a set of 30 minis that would work fine for a solo game but time is both fleeting and plenty in that Christmas period...

To be continued, maybe when the time goes back to normal ?

As for now, a **Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2026**