If it was good enough for Napoleon, its good enough for me!

I've never really been into miniatures. I appreciate them for their artistic value, and especially love old-school Grenadier and Ral Partha D&D minis for the nostalgic value. Although I used to enjoy war-games like Panzer Blitz, I never really got into minis-style wargaming. I've owned a starter-set of Warhammer 40K, and Mordheim, and played a couple of times, but the thought of painting minis was always overwhelming.

About a year ago, I found this thread on-line, of a minis battle based a little on the D&D module, Temple of Elemental Evil: http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=332091#332091.

Yeah, that's Gary Gygax in there.

Click the "Forward to Turn (x)" at the bottom of each series of pics. They're what I consider awe-inspiring.

Next, go look at one of the forums on Dwarven Forge's site: http://www.dwarvenforge.com/dwarvenforums/viewforum.php?id=3&p=1

People post pictures of all of the differetn minis-setups they make with their Dwarven Forge set-ups. I own a handful of Dwarven Forge's dungeon sets. I'd absolutely love more, but the expense is a bit much (though I'll likely pick up a couple of more sets over the spring).

(Check out anything done by invincibleoverloard...that guy's work is fantastic!)

Its work like this that makes me (1) want to use minis more in my own RPG's, and (2) kind of want to try more minis wargaming.

I have a nice-sized collection of Star Wars minis from Wizards of the Coast. Of course, I never saved any stat-cards (figuring I'd never play the minis game. This weekend, I went and dowloaded the rules off of the Wizards of the Coast website, and found a couple of sites that had all of the stats of all the different minis. So now, I think I'm going to try to organize a regular night for Star Wars minis-gaming.

I like the idea of it because it keeps me gaming, and obviously doesn't have the set-up time and creative investment of running a role-playing game. And we can play with just two people, so no worries about folks schedules getting messed up by gaming. People want to come to play, then they show up to play.

The game is played on flat mats, for the most part. I want to make some terrain, though, and likely mount it on boards that would suit a battle-mat. I think it would be a nice introduction to wargaming for me.