Tiny (mock) battles staged, fought at Cal State Fullerton
Could decisive historic battles have turned out differently?
Some of them may well have at a weekend event at Cal State Fullerton, although with literally much smaller consequences.
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“Mini Wars” gathered hundreds of miniature gaming enthusiasts and spectators for tiny conflicts – some from various historical eras and some from the realms of sci-fi and fantasy – that were staged with model soldiers, tanks and scaled-down battlefields.
Among the fighting forces were ancient Vikings and Celts, U.S. and British civil war troops, and various armies of World War II, said Harmon Ward, president of the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society, which put on the event.
What the mini-gamers do as a hobby is an old practice of warfare, Ward said. Before most advanced armed forces turned to computer simulations, generals would run tabletop battle drills to troubleshoot their strategies.
The hobbyists keep their battles within the rules of geography and physics – troops can only move as fast on the mock battlefield as they would in real life – but they don’t just reenact, Ward said. A different decision or superior strategy may yield an outcome that’s not in the history books.
Ward said he got interested in miniature gaming while hanging out as a kid at Brookhurst Hobbies in Garden Grove. Beyond the excitement of trying to win, he said, there’s a tactile pleasure in building and painting the models and playing a physical game that can’t be found online.
Ward’s grandsons are all miniature-gamers now too, he said, and the group would love to attract more young people.
“They’re living in a world where everything they do is virtual,” Ward said.
“We’re all kind of hoping that 100 years from now or even 200 years from now, kids will still actually pull out a model and assemble something with their hands.”