Between the failure of the Highland charge at Culloden in 1746 and the humiliation of France at Sedan in 1870, the Western world remade war from the ground up. The trigger was not a new weapon, though weapons changed enormously across those 125 years. It was an idea: that the nation, rather than the king, was the proper source of political authority, and therefore the proper source of soldiers.
The armies that followed from this idea were unlike anything that had come before. They were, at least in principle, assembled from the citizenry rather than hired from the margins of society. They fought not for pay or loyalty to a particular man but for something larger, independence, constitutional rights, a republic, a unified state. The transition was not clean or sudden. It happened across a century of experiments, reversals and catastrophes, fought on moorland, on forest roads, on city walls and on the open plains of France. But by the time Bismarck had assembled his conscript army on the Rhine, the transformation was complete. The professional soldier hired for a campaign had given way to the armed citizen called up by the state, drilled by a general staff, and equipped with weapons that made old close-order formations lethal to hold and suicidal to advance in.
The five conflicts in this article trace that transformation: from the last great dynastic rising on British soil, through the first war explicitly fought in the name of popular sovereignty, through a little-known constitutional civil war on the Iberian Peninsula, to a frontier republic born in eighteen minutes of battle, and finally to the industrial killing fields of France, where the age of nationalism reached its military climax. Each conflict is brought to the tabletop through WoFun's collections of pre-printed Plexiglass miniatures, where figurines arrive battle-ready and slot directly into MDF bases without paint or glue. The collections span 18mm and 28mm scales and cover both sides of each conflict with genuine historical care. What follows is a history of how the nation-state remade its armies, and a guide to fighting those armies across the table.
The Last Charge of Legitimacy: Jacobite Rising, 1745
The Jacobite rising of 1745 was, on the surface, a thoroughly pre-modern affair. It was fought for a dynasty, not a principle: the cause of the exiled Stuart king, Charles Edward Stuart, against the Hanoverian crown and its professional army. Yet the conflict belongs at the opening of this story. Culloden, the final battle of the rising, fought on a windswept moorland near Inverness on 16 April 1746, was not simply a defeat for the Jacobite cause. It was a demonstration, brutal in its clarity, that the age of the warrior charge was ending.
The Highland clansmen who followed Charles Edward south into England and back again were formidable fighters. They advanced in clan formations, fired a single volley and then closed at a dead run, broadswords drawn, a tactic that had broken Government lines at Prestonpans and Falkirk. At Culloden, Cumberland's infantry had been specifically drilled against it: trained to fire in rolling volleys, hold ground, and bayonet the man attacking the soldier to their right rather than their own attacker. The Highland charge dissolved in artillery fire and controlled musketry before it could close. The battle was over in less than an hour.
What made this a turning point was not simply the technology; flintlock muskets had existed for decades. It was the discipline. The Government army at Culloden was not a national army in any modern sense. It was a professional force fighting for a king. But the drilled, systematic, repeatable firepower it deployed pointed directly toward what the age of nationalism would eventually mass-produce: trained, interchangeable soldiers capable of holding a line under pressure and delivering controlled fire on command.
The Jacobite '45 PD collection places both sides of this clash across the table with genuine historical clarity. Both the 18mm Starter Pack and 28mm Starter Pack contain 398 figurines and 43 MDF bases, giving players two complete armies in a single purchase. On the Government side, three regiments of red-coated Regular Infantry represent the drilled professional battalions that held the moor that April morning, supported by a Dragoon regiment and an Artillery train whose guns tore gaps in the Jacobite ranks before the charge could reach them. Facing them, two Highland Clan regiments carry precisely the mix of muskets and broadswords that history records, their armed posture making the tactical choice, to fire or to charge, visible in the figurines themselves. A regiment of Royal Ecossais, French-trained regulars who represent the Jacobite attempt at professional organisation, and a Lowland Infantry regiment complete the rebel order of battle. Bases measure 30×20mm in the 18mm scale and 40×30mm in 28mm, both MDF-printed in green grass texture. The contrast between the two armies is not decorative; it is the argument of the battle itself. Andy Callan's free rules, give players the Fire Discipline test that puts the Highland charge's all-or-nothing quality at the centre of every game.
Fighting for an Idea: American Revolution, 1775-83
Less than thirty years after Culloden, the idea that had been absent from that moorland, that a people could constitute themselves as a political community and take up arms in their own name, found its first full military expression in the thirteen American colonies.
The American Revolution was not won by riflemen firing from behind trees, whatever popular myth suggests. The Continental Army that George Washington patiently assembled was a line infantry force, drilled in the European manner, fighting pitched battles with muskets and bayonets. What made it different was its character: these were men who had chosen to serve, who understood why they were fighting, and who could be replaced when they fell not by hired substitutes but by new volunteers drawn from the same political community. The British army was technically superior in almost every engagement and won most of the battles. It could not win the war, because the war was not, at bottom, a military competition. It was a test of whether one side could outlast the other's will, and the side with a cause outlasted the side with a contract.
The one genuinely new tactical element the Revolution contributed was the role of the rifleman. Where standard infantry carried smooth-bore muskets effective at roughly fifty metres, the American long rifle could engage accurately at two hundred. Deployed as skirmishers ahead of the Continental line, riflemen disrupted formations, picked off officers, and withdrew before a bayonet charge could close with them. They could not stand against formed infantry alone, but they forced the British to reckon with accurate, long-range fire, a tactical problem that the breech-loader would make universal a century later.
The American Revolution PD collection and its companion American Revolution WoF range capture this dual character of the war with precision. The 18mm Starter Pack and 28mm Starter Pack each contain 427 figurines across 5 Plexiglass sprues, with 62 MDF bases. The American order of battle fields two Regular Infantry regiments alongside two Militia Infantry regiments, exactly the combination of trained Continentals and unreliable but replaceable volunteers that Washington managed for eight years, plus two Riflemen and Skirmisher regiments that can be advanced to harass the British line and then pulled back before contact. One Artillery regiment and a Mounted General complete the force. The British counter with four Regular Infantry regiments, one Skirmisher regiment and two Artillery regiments: the professional machine that won the battles it could win and could not solve the one it couldn't. Andy Callan's free rules build the terrain asymmetry and American resilience directly into the game mechanics, making the strategic paradox of the war playable from the first move. Collectors wanting the full scope of the conflict can step up to the 18mm Full Pack or 28mm Full Pack, which expand to 1507 figurines across 18 sprues, adding Hessian mercenaries, early British Grenadiers, and the complete range of Continental and Loyalist regiments that populated eight years of war across a continent.
Brothers Against Brothers: The War of the Two Brothers, 1828-34
The Portuguese Civil War of 1828-34, known as the War of the Two Brothers or the Liberal Wars, is the least familiar conflict in this article and, for that reason, perhaps the most instructive.
It was fought between two half-brothers: Dom Pedro, former Emperor of Brazil and liberal constitutionalist, whose faction supported his daughter Queen Maria II and a written constitution, and Dom Miguel, absolutist and traditionalist, who claimed the Portuguese throne on the old principle of dynastic right alone. Both sides organised their armies along Napoleonic lines, battalions of infantry, cavalry regiments, foot artillery, because that was the working template of the age. The difference was entirely ideological. The Liberals were fighting for a principle that had been stated in Philadelphia in 1776 and proclaimed in Paris in 1789: that legitimate government required the consent of the governed. The Miguelites were fighting to preserve a world in which it did not. Two modern armies, built from identical components, pointed at each other across a constitutional question.
The decisive campaign was the Siege of Porto, which lasted from July 1832 to August 1833. The Liberal army, dramatically outnumbered, held the city behind improvised fortifications, beat off Miguelite assaults, and endured for thirteen months while a Liberal naval expedition sailed south and captured Lisbon, breaking the strategic deadlock. The siege also produced one of the conflict's more distinctive tactical innovations: the Lancers raised by Colonel Bacon, a cavalry unit whose charge tactics, combining speed with the reach of the lance, gave the Liberal horse a first-contact advantage in open engagement. It was a small innovation in the context of European military history, but it was a Liberal innovation, the constitutionalist side, fighting for change, deploying a new arm against a conservative force fighting for the old order.
The War of Two Brothers SC collection, illustrated by Sérgio Veludo Coelho, gives players both sides of this symmetrical, bitterly fought war. Each Starter Pack, in 18mm or 28mm, contains 392 figurines on 6 Plexiglass sprues with 54 MDF bases at 30×20mm or 40×30mm respectively. Liberal and Miguelite armies are built to the same template: three infantry battalions with commanders, a Skirmisher and Light Infantry detachment, a cavalry regiment, two Foot Artillery companies and a Mounted General. That deliberate symmetry reflects the symmetry of the conflict itself, two forces of equivalent organisation fighting for opposing ideas of legitimate authority. The rules, adapted by Sérgio Veludo Coelho from Andy Callan's Peninsular War framework, build in the cavalry charge bonus, the guerrilla band mechanics that the irregular fighting around Porto demands, and the siege dynamics that shaped the war's decisive campaign. Full Packs for expanding both armies to their full historical width are available in 18mm and 28mm.
Revolution on the Frontier: Texas, 1835-36
The Texas Revolution of 1835-36 compressed the experience of the American Revolution into nine months and a landscape of desert, river and fortress wall. The Texians, a mixed force of American settlers, Mexican Tejanos and a handful of professional soldiers, rose against the centralism of Santa Anna's government, which had suspended the local autonomy Texas had operated under since colonisation. What followed was not the orderly mobilisation of a people but the improvised, chaotic, often suicidal resistance of a frontier community fighting to exist on its own terms.
The Alamo, a fortified mission in San Antonio held for thirteen days in February and March 1836 against thousands of Mexican regulars, became the defining image of the citizen-soldier at his most extreme: a garrison of roughly 200 men choosing a siege they could not survive in order to buy time for a republic they believed in. The Alamo fell on 6 March 1836. Six weeks later, at San Jacinto on 21 April, General Sam Houston's Texian army caught Santa Anna's forces at rest in the afternoon heat and destroyed them in eighteen minutes. Santa Anna was taken prisoner the next morning. The Republic of Texas was born.
What distinguishes this conflict tactically from those earlier in this article is the presence of three entirely distinct fighting styles on the same battlefield. The Mexican army operated in the European tradition: drilled infantry, formed cavalry, artillery. The Texian forces fought as light infantry, skirmishing and shooting from cover, their Mounted Infantry combining the mobility of cavalry with the firepower of riflemen. And the Comanche warriors who appear in the collection belonged to neither army's command structure, raiders whose presence on the Texas frontier shaped the strategic context of the entire revolution, long before and long after the battles that history remembers.
The Texas Revolution PD collection, illustrated by Peter Dennis, reflects all three dimensions. The Starter Packs in 18mm and 28mm give players the essential confrontation in 297 figurines across 8 Plexiglass sprues, with 58 MDF bases. Expanding to the Full Pack, 540 figurines across 8 sprues in 18mm or the 28mm version, opens up the full historical picture. Mexican Infantry in regulation and fatigue uniform, Grenadier and Light companies, Light Cavalry, Regular Cavalry and Presidial Cavalry, Texian Infantry, uniformed Texian volunteers, Tejano companies, Texian Mounted Infantry, Tejano Commanders, shared Mexican and Texan Artillery and Officers, Skirmish Infantry, and both Mounted and foot Comanche Warriors are all present. The Comanche figurines are not an afterthought. They represent the third dimension of a conflict that the Alamo legend tends to flatten into a two-sided story, and their inclusion in the Full Pack makes for a strategically richer game than the standard narrative has ever suggested.
The Nation in Arms: Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71
By 1870, the citizen-soldier, the ideologically motivated army, the rifleman's advantage at range, had been industrialised. Prussia had done what no previous state had managed: it had turned the nation-in-arms from a revolutionary improvisation into a bureaucratic system, as reliable and repeatable as a railway timetable. The Landwehr conscription system ensured that virtually every adult male had received military training. The general staff planned operations years in advance, mapped every road and rail line a corps might need, and assigned command on merit rather than birth. When France declared war in July 1870, the Prussian mobilisation moved 380,000 men to the frontier in eighteen days.
France, by contrast, was fighting with the army of an empire, not a nation. The French Chassepot rifle outranged the Prussian Dreyse needle gun, and the Mitrailleuse could have been devastating in a defensive role. Neither advantage proved decisive, because the French army lacked the organisational structure to use its weapons at the scale the war demanded. Formations broke down, orders failed to arrive, and Krupp's steel breech-loading artillery consistently outperformed French guns at every level of engagement that mattered. At Sedan on 1 September 1870, the Army of Châlons was surrounded and destroyed. Napoleon III surrendered in person. Within six months, the German Empire had been proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the age of dynastic warfare in Western Europe was effectively over.
The Franco-Prussian War SS collection, produced in partnership with SoldierShop and illustrated by Gianpaolo Bistulfi, is the most expansive offering, because this was the most fully articulated national army the nineteenth century had yet produced, with a depth and variety of specialist formations on both sides that no earlier conflict could have assembled. The collection is available as a Full Pack containing 19 Plexiglass sprues and 179 MDF bases across five sizes (120×20mm, 80×20mm, 60×20mm, 35×20mm and 20×20mm), reflecting the regiment-scale organisation of the SoldierShop format.
The Prussian order of battle runs from standard line infantry through the Prussian Infantry and Musical Band, Prussian Infantry and Officers, Hussars and Cuirassiers, Hussars and Ulans, the Black Hussars alongside Dragoons and Bavarian Dragoons, Artillerymen and Lancers, Bavarian Artillery 1870 and Prussian Officers, the coalition army Bismarck assembled from the German states, rendered with the precision that Bistulfi's illustration brings to the period. The French side is equally detailed, and equally revealing of why France lost. Line Infantry, Guard Infantry, Zouaves and Infantry Sailors speak to an army that had spent decades building prestige specialist formations whose battlefield role in a war of this scale was ultimately marginal. French Cavalry, Chasseurs, Hussars, Cent Guards, Artillery Crew and Officers complete the collection. The full array of French specialisms captured across these 19 sprues is, in miniature, a portrait of the wrong answer to the age of nationalism: a magnificent imperial army, expensive and colourful, that had never quite become a national one. WoFun's free wargaming rules offer compatible systems for fighting the period across both sides of the frontier.
The Table is the Place to Find Out
From the broadsword charge at Culloden to the Krupp gun at Sedan, these five conflicts trace 125 years of a single transformation: the soldier changed from a hired man fighting for a king to a conscript carrying the weight of an idea. Whether that was progress is a question the following century answered at enormous cost. For now, the table is the place to explore it, to command the Highland clans or the Government line, to hold a river crossing at Porto, to make the decision Washington made every winter, to send mounted infantry across the San Jacinto plain or to mass Prussian artillery on the heights above Sedan.