Picture two tables in the same club room on the same evening. On the first, a dozen figures creep between the buildings of a frontier town, and every single one of them has a name, a grudge, and a plan. On the second, six thousand men in ranked battalions stretch across four feet of tabletop, and no individual matters at all, only the shape of the line they form. Both tables are hosting a wargame. Both groups of players will go home convinced they spent the evening exactly the right way. And yet the two games have almost nothing in common beyond dice and miniatures.
This is the oldest divide in the hobby: skirmish wargaming against mass battle wargaming. Newcomers often assume the difference is simply one of size, that a skirmish is a battle with fewer figures. It is not. The two styles ask entirely different questions of the player, reward entirely different instincts, and, at WoFun Games, they are even built differently, down to the bases the figurines stand on. Knowing which question excites you more is the fastest way to choose your first collection well, and this guide exists to help you answer it.
The skirmisher's question: what does this one person do next?
A skirmish game is a story told at human scale. Your force is a handful of individuals, rarely more than twenty or thirty figures, and each one acts alone. The gunfighter behind the water trough is not part of a unit; he is a character with a line of sight, a loaded revolver, and a decision to make. When he falls, you feel it, because he was a specific someone rather than a fraction of a battalion's fighting strength.
That character focus changes everything about how the game plays. Terrain stops being an obstacle to formation movement and becomes the whole chessboard: a doorway is cover, a rooftop is a firing position, an alley is an ambush waiting to happen. Scenarios drift naturally toward narrative objectives, a rescue, a robbery, a duel of honour, rather than the simple destruction of the enemy. Games are fast to set up, quick to finish, and playable on a kitchen table, which makes the style a favourite for weeknight gaming and for introducing new players. We explored this world in depth in our guide to skirmish wargaming from samurai duels to Wild West shootouts, which walks through the periods where small-scale fighting shines brightest.
Even defeat feels different at this scale. Losing a skirmish rarely means losing everything; it means your surviving figures slipped away into the hills with a score to settle, which is exactly the seed of the next scenario. Many skirmish players string their games into ongoing campaigns for precisely this reason, letting the same characters grow, feud, and fall across a whole season of evenings. The game becomes a serial drama, and the tabletop becomes its stage.
If you find yourself replaying the fate of individual figures after a game, inventing backstories for your survivors, or caring more about how a fight unfolded than who technically won, you are a skirmisher at heart.
The commander's question: where does the line break?
Mass battle wargaming, which WoFun calls tactical wargaming, asks you to stop thinking like a soldier and start thinking like a general. Your playing pieces are no longer people but units: battalions, squadrons, batteries. The drama does not come from a single figure's fate but from the terrible arithmetic of the whole field. Is your left flank strong enough to hold while your right delivers the decisive blow? Can that cavalry reserve reach the gap before the enemy exploits it? Will the raw brigade in your centre stand one more volley?
Formation, frontage, and morale are the currency of this style. A battalion in line delivers maximum firepower but crawls across the table; a column moves fast but invites slaughter. Committing your reserve a turn too early loses battles just as surely as committing it a turn too late. It is warfare as a problem of geometry and nerve, and it produces the great sweeping spectacles that draw most of us into the hobby in the first place: the ordered lines, the massed charges, the moment a whole wing gives way. Our article on the art of pitched battle wargaming from Gaugamela to Gettysburg traces how that command experience works across twenty-two centuries of set-piece battle.
There is also a distinct relationship with history in this style. A skirmish borrows a period's flavour; a mass battle recreates its actual military problems. When your line infantry struggle to change formation under fire, you are wrestling with the same constraint that shaped real doctrine from Leuthen to Gettysburg, and refighting a historical engagement becomes a genuine experiment: could Ney have taken the crossroads if he had pressed harder before noon? The tactical game lets you test the counterfactual with your own hands.
If you love the moment when a plan visibly comes together across an entire table, if you would rather manage five hard trade-offs than one perfect hero, you were born to command mass battles.
The tell is in the base
Here is something most manufacturers never make explicit, and WoFun builds directly into the product: the two styles need physically different miniatures.
Every WoFun collection carries a designer's signature in its name, and that signature tells you which game it was drawn for. The VB collections, illustrated by Vyacheslav Batalov, and the GS fantasy ranges are skirmish lines. Their figurines stand on individual bases, from 15mm rounds up to 4cm, one warrior per base, free to move alone, because in a skirmish every figure is its own decision. Batalov even draws in the side-on perspective of the old flat-figure tradition, giving each character a distinct pose and personality that rewards the close viewing distance of a small game.
The PD collections, illustrated by Peter Dennis, along with the JP and KC ranges, are tactical lines. Their figurines come in strips and stand on group bases, 30 x 20mm in 18mm scale and 40 x 30mm in 28mm, holding two ranks of soldiers shoulder to shoulder. A base is not a person; it is a company, a building block of battalions. The WoF ranges sit deliberately in the middle and work for both styles. In other words, the answer to "which style of wargamer are you?" maps directly onto "which shelf of the WoFun catalogue is yours?" What follows is a tour of both shelves.
The skirmisher's shelf: the VB collections
Feudal Japan may be the perfect skirmish setting, a world where the duel between named warriors carried as much cultural weight as the outcome of the campaign. The Samurai Age 18mm Full Pack puts that world on your table with 278 figurines across 8 Plexiglass sprues, each one slotting into its own round 15mm base, with mounted samurai on 20 x 35mm rectangles. Foot commanders, mounted samurai, disciplined ashigaru, and peasant soldiers give you everything needed to stage clan clashes, Mongol invasion beach fights, or Imjin War raids where a single champion's stand can decide the scenario.
The American frontier is the other great home of small-scale fighting, and the Wild West skirmish collection leans fully into it. Batalov's gunfighters, lawmen, and outlaws are drawn for exactly the kind of game the setting demands: a main street at high noon, a bank robbery gone wrong, a posse closing in on a hideout, every figure an individual with a role in the story.
For something older and darker, the Dark Ages 18mm Full Pack delivers 177 figurines on 5 sprues, again on individual round bases. The age of Viking raids is skirmish warfare in its purest historical form. Most of the era's violence was not the great shield-wall battle but the longship crew hitting a coastal village at dawn, a few dozen warriors a side, where the fight turned on who held the doorway of the burning hall. These packs let you play those raids exactly as they happened, warrior by warrior.
The commander's shelf: the PD collections
If the general's chair calls to you, the fastest way to sit in it is the Seven Years War Starter Pack in 18mm. The set fields two complete armies on 58 group bases and pairs them with free downloadable rules by veteran designer Andy Callan, written for engagements of the kind that flared around the era's giant battles. The rules teach you to think in units from the very first turn. When advancing enemy first come within musketry range, each of your battalions must pass a Fire Control test: succeed well and it holds its fire for one devastating, tightly controlled first volley; fail and it blazes away uncontrollably, hitting almost nothing for the rest of the fight. No single soldier makes that choice. The battalion does, and you live with it. Prussian infantry even roll an extra shooting die per battalion for their famous platoon fire, doctrine expressed as dice.
From there the tactical shelf scales up as far as your ambition. The Napoleonic Age collections by Peter Dennis put the ranked battalions of the Grande Armee and its enemies on two-rank group bases built for line, column, and square. And when you are ready for genuinely army-sized commands, the 10mm Napoleonic range shrinks the figure and grows the battle, letting entire corps manoeuvre on a table that would host only a brigade in larger scales. This is the style at its most cinematic: hundreds of bases, whole army wings in motion, and you responsible for all of it.
A quick self-diagnosis
Still unsure? Try answering four questions honestly. First, when you watch a war film, do your eyes follow the hero through the chaos, or do you find yourself studying the shape of the battle behind him? The hero-watchers are skirmishers; the map-readers are commanders. Second, what frustrates you more in a game: losing a favourite character to one unlucky die roll, or watching a sound plan unravel because a single unit failed at the wrong moment? The first sting belongs to skirmish, the second to mass battle, and the one that bothers you more is usually the one you care about more. Third, do you prefer rules you can hold entirely in your head after one read, leaving all your attention for cunning, or rules with enough moving parts that mastering them is part of the pleasure? Skirmish systems tend toward the former, tactical systems toward the latter. Fourth, and most practically, how does gaming actually fit into your week? An hour snatched after dinner points one way; a protected Sunday afternoon points the other.
There is no wrong answer, and your answer will probably change over the years. Plenty of wargamers begin as skirmishers because the entry is gentle, discover a taste for command, and drift toward ever larger battles. Just as many veteran generals rediscover the joy of ten figures and a story when time gets short. The point of the diagnosis is not to assign you a permanent tribe. It is to make sure your first purchase matches your first instinct, because nothing stalls a new hobby faster than starting with the wrong kind of fun.
The honest answer: most of us are both
Here is the secret the two camps rarely admit: almost every long-term wargamer ends up playing both styles, because they scratch different itches. The same person who spends Saturday moving corps across a Napoleonic battlefield will happily spend Tuesday evening running four gunfighters through a dusty street. A skirmish is a short story; a mass battle is a novel. Nobody reads only one.
The practical questions matter more than tribal loyalty. How much time do you have? A skirmish fits in an hour; a big battle wants an afternoon. How much space? Individual-based VB warbands thrive on a small table, while an 18mm tactical game runs comfortably on roughly 90 x 120cm and a 28mm spectacle stretches larger. Who are you playing with? New players and younger opponents usually click with skirmish first, because caring about one figure is instinctive, then graduate to commanding brigades once the dice feel familiar.
Because every WoFun figurine arrives pre-printed and ready to play, trying both styles costs you an evening rather than a winter of painting. Press the figures from their sprues, slot them into their bases, and the question of which wargamer you are stops being theoretical.
Choose your table
So, which is it? If your imagination runs to named heroes, tight corners, and stories you will retell for years, start with the individual-based worlds of the VB shelf and let a samurai duel or a Wild West shootout be your first game. If you dream in battle lines, flank marches, and the sound of a hundred bases advancing in step, take command of a Peter Dennis tactical collection and fight the big battles the history books remember. And if you truly cannot decide, the WoFun Starter Packs settle it the enjoyable way: two balanced armies, simple rules, and a finished game on the table tonight. Play one skirmish and one battle. Your answer will find you before the dice go cold.