There's never enough table space, is there? Whether you're fighting fantasy battles or restaging Waterloo, whatever tabletop battlefield you have access to is never quite big enough to fit all of your models and scenery, particularly if you want to keep firing ranges to scale with your figures. One group of friends in the Chicago area has turned to a truly timeless answer to this dilemma - dig up your yard, and turn it into a scale map. We spoke to Thomas Beck about the custom miniature wargame he's working on, and the 15,000 figure games it allows his gang to play.
Like many ambitious outdoors projects, the wargame - which is still unnamed - has its origins in the Covid lockdowns. "My brother Matt and I decided to do an outdoor game with inspiration from Axis and Allies, the Total War series on PC, Battlefield I, and Warhammer". "With a ton of time on our hands we made massive maps that correlated to one another and ordered a ton of troops from Armies in Plastic", he adds - and when he says "a ton", he means literally thousands of 1/32 scale miniatures.
"The largest game we have done to date was a 1700's inspired battle consisting of 15,000 1/32 miniatures, over 100 cannon and a few hundred cavalry men", Beck says. The initial fight "lasted five days" with "an ensuing campaign that resulted in four more battles over the next two weeks".
Beck is "currently running a World War One campaign with four other players, including 15,000 WW1 styled soldiers, representing 22 different nations spread across ten indoor and outdoor gaming maps representing the various frontlines". The rules for the game are still in development, and he says that at their core they're simple - though "Just because the rule set is made for quick and simple solutions, doesn't mean the game has to go by quickly". 15,000 miniatures is a lot to move.
People can be sceptical of World War 1 wargames. While the Great War had dynamic periods, you generally have to zoom out from platoon engagements and 15mm or 28mm scale miniatures up to the level of brigades or even divisions to find the push and pull, and that moves us more towards war board games than miniatures.
The gradual degradation of the European landscape and the changing trench lines is also tricky to properly capture in a campaign. It's one of the most visually arresting elements of the war, but proper recessed trenches are so time-consuming to make that very few people make one set, let alone consider evolving them over time.
But playing outside brings the reality of trench warfare to life in remarkable ways, as Beck discovered during an early test in 2021. "During the Somme campaign that lasted three months (across three maps) we had several rain delays" when "Parts of the maps flooded making attacks nearly impossible".
As in most miniature wargames "There are penalties for moving through water or mud making attacks difficult". The players responded like real life commanders: "Anytime this happened players would just resort to artillery rolls until things dried up", and "Eventually trench lines shifted to the areas that flooded the least".
The time needed to create one of these outdoors battlefields varies greatly. "If we want farm fields, it can take me a weekend to prepare", Beck says, "However, some maps have taken me a few hours to construct, on other occasions, no time at all".
The Somme campaign saw dynamic changes unfold over a rolling grassy area of Beck's yard. To start, Beck "Dug out a road, filled it in with sand and small pebbles to make a cobblestone road". "We then spent the next three months tearing up that section of the yard as more craters were dug out from our artillery and more trenches began to scratch across the surface as we dug in".
Beck and his brother, plus friends Kody and Dravin, are working on formalising the ruleset to go on sale, currently working as the group Frontline Frames. Beck hopes to have something ready to publish in 2026, with "A Great War campaign and a Civil war campaign as the first two rule sets". He's even exploring how to create a 1/32 toy soldier line for Great War miniatures.
This really is getting back in touch with an earlier era of wargaming: HG Well's Little Wars, played on the carpet with toy soldiers; Fletcher Pratt's naval wargame with its scale-accurate ranges, that pretty much had to be played on the floor of a large hall; even the sculptable sand tables that were the precursor to modern fixed gaming tables. Or perhaps it's as universal as the childhood joy of playing with toys in the yard.
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