I’ve been swamped at work lately and didn’t have the time to put up these photos. I’ve always had a fascination with miniatures, especially Warhammer 40k, but I’m well aware of how expensive and time consuming getting into the hobby will be. This is why something like BattleLore is the next best thing. It’s a simplified wargame that you play with plastic miniatures on a game board. My wife and I tried it out at CarcaSean last Saturday (handily they already had the board and pieces out for a game of their own).

My first surprise was that the miniatures are really, really tiny. I mean, I’ve looked at photos of them on the net, but you have to hold them in the hand to realize how small they really are. I guess the size is necessary to fit the more than 200 figures into the box and to keep the game board at a reasonable size. After all, each hex needs to be able to hold four infantry figures.

The second surprise is that contrary to my expectations about it being a complicated game, it’s actually quite easy to set up and the game flows smoothly once you understand the basics. Granted, we’ve only played the first two scenarios, so we haven’t gotten into the Lore stuff yet, but we’ve had a very enjoyable and the number of scenarios makes this a very promising long term prospect. With all the extra Lore and War Council added in, this will be a game with plenty of legs indeed.

We liked it so much in fact that we’ve decided to buy a copy of it. We’ve said as much to Sean. The only problem is how to store the huge thing. I don’t think stuffing the miniatures back into the box once it’s been opened would be practical so we’re going to have to get a big table to put everything on. We’ll probably get around to that by the middle to end of this month. As you can see, Sean hasn’t bothered to paint his figures and I doubt I’ll ever get around to it myself. I can just imagine the difficulty of trying to point the tip of the brush at just the right spots on the little things!

In the meantime, it seems that my long ordered copy of Arkham Horror has arrived, so we’ll be going on Saturday to pick it up. So many games, so little time!