Seleucus Style: What I want in a wargame
Welcome back, fellow nerds. It's still fairly early in 2026 and I was doing a mental inventory to try and have an even better year in regards to my hobby time, and I thought I'd share some of my ideas with you fine folks.
As everybody knows, wargaming is something of a balancing act between hobby time, money spent, and games played. It is up to each and every one of us to decide what the ideal balance is for us, but in 2025 I was dissatisfied with the amount of money I spent, and the amount of games I played. To bring that more in balance this year I have identified the three things I want most out of a wargame.
1) Small footprint
A significant barrier on my ability to play more games is that I live more than an hour away from where the local community plays games, and I have a limited ability to host. This means that if I am going to try and introduce someone to a new game, or provide all materials for a game, I need to be able to carry it on my person with minimal difficulty.
Kill Team is the Platonic ideal of physical game size for me. With a 22" x 30" board, and 5-15 models per side it wasn't unduly difficult to pack a board, terrain, and two teams into my bag and make the trek to play games. Unfortunately Kill Team has fallen in popularity with the latest edition, and my beloved Infinity fails this test miserably in that it requires a 4' x 4' board with lots of terrain for the best experience.
2) Low model count
I'm a fairly productive painter and have averaged 292 painted models per year over the past three years, but at this point I have a huge collection of painted models to choose from and would like to focus on improving my painting skills instead of just cranking out large numbers this year. A game that requires fewer than 20 models per side allows me to really focus on improving the techniques I'm already familiar with, and trying new ones that I am not.
My large Yu Jing collection means I can really focus on trying to improve my non-metallic metals when I add the odd unit here or there, and Guild Ball only requires six models per side which gives me the freedom to explore the beautiful sculpts for that game.
3) High-impact decisions
Mordheim is an absolute classic of a game, and I adore playing it when a chance presents itself, but oh boy does the game design feel dated at this point. Roll to hit, roll to wound, roll a save, roll to see what kind of wound you do, and then roll again on the lasting injury table to see what happens to your beloved hero. It's still a fun game, but the continuous rolling is clunky, and has turned me off more recent offerings like Battletech, Pillage! from Victrix, and Port Royal from Firelock Games.
Give me a system in which I have the ability to express my skill (or lack thereof) on the table by allocating resources, or moving models to manipulate ranges or cover! I've found that Infinity have been great for this, and I'm hoping Malifaux is as well.
That's it folks! Thanks for reading if you've made it this far, and please let me know if there are any games I haven't listed that I should check out.
