If you’re all done with your Christmas shopping (if not, better get your skates on) then you probably don’t have much spare change to be chucking at pricey Warhammer minis and other official miniatures. Luckily, denizens of the Super Cheap Wargaming Facebook group have shown us how old Christmas decorations can be turned into minis and terrain that is every bit as fine as Games Workshop’s.
A lot of the posts we’ve seen involve miniature Christmas trees being co-opted into pine forest battlefields, but there are some more ‘out there’ Christmas decoration minis being constructed as well. For instance, Brett Mottram incorporated baubles and faux-fir to make minis for Krankerwald, a miniature wargame of their own creation which takes place in a sick, corrupted forest.
The two different models we’ve seen from Mottram include these wraiths, made from superglue and tissue paper draped over ”army men armatures”. They don’t look particularly Christmassy right now – closer to something from Warhammer Age of Sigmar than Santa’s grotto – but their mighty metal crowns actually come from the tops of broken Christmas baubles.
There’s also Troncho the Treeman, who is made from Christmas decoration bits, as well as cocktail sticks, and lots of hot glue. Mottram says the figure must have cost less than £1 to make, and will soon be the head of a whole host of dryad creatures. You can find the free wargame rules for Krankerwald in this post.
Christmas day typically means a lot of waste, as wine is drunk and chocolate is munched. You can recycle some of that packaging into terrain, like Adrian Ford has done for the models below. “At Christmas, I received a couple of these Ferro Roche plastic balls filled with sweets,” Ford explains in their post. “I am converting them (with some modelling clay) into some disgusting alien pods/eggs/hives/overmind sort of terrain for use in sci-fi wargames.”
You don’t have to get quite so crafty as this to harness the holiday for your hobbying however. There are plenty of Crimbo decorations that work for wargaming right out the box. Ross Edward found Coles’ Christmas Tabletop Pine Tree to be the perfect terrain piece “for anyone crazy enough to be playing in 54mm”, while Josh McNair raided Michaels and Walmart for buildings, snagging this light up house and church.
If you really want to put some wargaming into your Christmas, try this miniature game that can be played at Christmas dinner. And for some fun reading and recaps, check out our guides to the best Warhammer 40k books and all the Warhammer 40k factions.