Is Miniatures Gaming Dying?

My first exposure to miniatures gaming was at Hobby Town in Lincoln, Nebraska where I saw the boxed set for Johnny Reb.  I was drawn to the idea of having huge dioramas with miniature figures moving around it.  Miniature train sets were big at the time, so I had seen a lot of their fancy setups.  The idea of adding a game to that seemed like a load of fun.

I couldn't wait to play, so I cut out a bunch of cardboard squares and began playing with those while I collected and painted miniatures.  I played other people's historical games as well, and even eventually invented my own called Command Combat: Civil War.

However, something's happened over the past 20 years that's bad news for people who loved this hobby.  With the rise of video games that can accurately show battles and the ease of which it is to play on a computer versus learning tabletop rules, more and more of the young audience have turned away from miniature war gaming, or never trying it to begin with.

This has been aided by the refusal of the old guard of mini wargaming players to adapt.  Most of the time you hear complaints from them about how young people are just impatient and stupid rather than trying to understand what they like and reaching out to them.  Instead of streamlining the rules or making the games more friendly to new players, they often nitpick on details and turn a cold shoulder to anyone who's not already in the no.  Rather than showing off their incredible dioramas online as much as they can, they complain about how the internet is ruining everything.  Everything is everyone else's fault, and their hobby is a victim to attention deficit disorder.

But that's not how it has to be.  A few companies ARE listening to younger people, and even some older people who never got into the hobby because of complicated rules and expensive minis.  They're making games with easier to learn rules based on properties that everyone's familiar with, and they're showing them off in every medium that are being looked at today.  Rather than complain about people who are different from them, they're studying what they like and embracing what they learn.

Probably the best example of this is Fantasy Flight Games.  Upon releasing miniatures games, they always have enough minis to play with right out of the box.  Expansions are sold at reasonable prices, and in logical groupings.  For instance, rather than just selling a bag full of overpriced random minis, as was done a lot in the past, or selling seven pieces when eight are needed, as Games Workshop did, Fantasy Flight sells a full unit in a box.  So if you need a unit of eight soldiers, the box comes with eight soldiers... already placed on their bases so you don't have to go out and buy balsa wood bases!

The result has been a huge and loyal following, and a renewed interest in miniatures war gaming.  Yet strangely, you still see a lot of grumbling from the very people who claim they want to keep their hobby alive.  Rather than celebrating the heightened interest, you hear them in their little echo chambers complaining that the young people only want to play their simple games and won't try any "real" games.

Well, they can have their "real" games and miniature war gaming will rebuild with this new audience.