A lot of tabletop RPG fans are also enjoying tabletop miniatures games – and vice versa. Unfortunately, the tabletop miniatures hobby is pretty expensive and time-consuming. I still remember when I played Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 with my friends. Aside from buying the miniatures (which were mainly made from metal), you needed paint, brushes, materials to build terrain, rules, faction books just to get started. Don’t ask me how much money I put into the several armies which are now sitting in a cardboard box somewhere in my house. But nowadays there are easier and faster ways to dabble in tabletop miniature gaming.
Recently a friend and fellow blogger, Jay Steven Anyong, (check out his blog, Patreon and itch.io page) recently recommended One Page Rules to me. The project started out as a one-page ruleset to play tabletop battles with, but it eventually spawned several rulesets (for battles, skirmishes, narrative campaigns) and two original settings inspired by Warhammer including a huge number of factions. The best thing is: most of it is free. You can even get free paper miniatures from DriveThruRPG (and its sister sites). With the advent of affordable 3D printers they also started to provide STL files for original miniatures through their Patreon and MyMiniFactory and preprinted ones via Etsy. So it is a viable alternative to – for example – the games from that workshop in the UK. 😉
Personally, I am not that interested in miniature gaming anymore. I don’t have anyone to play with living nearby and I never had the patience for painting whole armies of miniatures. But I really like what I’ve seen from the lore they created and might eventually pick up the books just for reading pleasure. If you are excited by the miniature hobby I highly recommend you check out One Page Rules. For the price of free you get several complete and fully playable games which you can play using any miniatures you already own, or you can just use the freely available paper minis!
