6mm skirmish on hex grid

To keep from having to do a lot measuring and precise placement of miniatures, I decided to try out a hex-grid. I think it's going to work quite well. This works out to 0.5" from center to center of each hex.

I think it's a good idea. I can measure distances by counting hexes (and not be too far off), and I like the slight 'uncertainty' about a figures actual position that it adds. Line of sight should be pretty easy to figure out as well.

It looks like about 3 figures can fit in any given hex, which sounds about right. I guess you'd have to let figures in neighboring hexes fight in close combat as well as figures in the same hex. Perhaps only allow friendly figures to share hexes?

Magnetized Epic-scale building ruins (and Squats!)

I magnetized a bunch of ruins for the 6mm skirmish set. This is really starting to come together. A little one-sided in that it's all ruined walls, but I think a few more solid pieces will round out the set nicely.

I'm also happy to have scored some Squats on eBay, so I have another (of my favorites!) retinue for ItEN.

Yay! I got some new miniatures in the mail (eBay is awesome).

This should give me enough variety to do an interesting Space Marine retinue for ItEN, and perhaps Orks. I'm not as familar with Orks, so I don't know exactly what I have here, but it looks like an Ork in some power armor, some with rifles and bayonets and some little guys with long rifles. They'll need some backup to fill out their retinue, but I have a few Ork sprues coming in the mail from the UK.

I'm not sure how useful they'll be for small-scale skirmishes, but I'm excited that there will be three big Ork Stompers in the package too!

6mm scale skirmish game

I started a project to take 6mm-scale figures (Epic 40k at this point) and individually base them so I could use them in a skirmish-style game. My goal was to make something like Warhammer 40k, but scaled down to take up less room. And I like really tiny things.

Inspired by a number of  projects on the web, I decided to base them on magnets and play on a metal surface  to minimize the amount of moving around the pieces would do. I tried a number of different options to see what would work best. Here's a first pass on magnetic bases. 

Some of these are based on cut-outs from sheet magnets (like you can get a craft stores...refrigerator magnets). Some are based on rare earth magnets, and those work well. I had originally ordered 6mm magnets (about 1/4", the size of an Epic mini base), but found that you can't bring the bases to close together (the poles will repel each other). I order some 4mm and 2mm magnets to try out different combinations.

What I ended up doing was drilling 2mm holes in the bases and gluing 2mm magnets flush with the bottom. This gave me the look I wanted (a scaled-down 28mm miniature) and enough magnetic pull to adhere well. Here are the beginnings of some groups I've put together.

These should work will with square-gridded maps too. Here's some miniatures layed out a 1/4" grid map (originally intended for the Star Wars miniatures game, 25% scale). The map is sitting on a small magnetic whiteboard.