Pick up your first wargaming rulebook and you meet a small mountain of unfamiliar words before you have finished page one. Troops deploy in column. Cavalry works around a flank. Infantry throw themselves into square. A general fights to keep the initiative. It reads like a foreign language, and for a lot of would-be players that first page is quietly where the hobby ends. It shouldn't be. Every one of those terms is simple once somebody explains it in plain English, and that is the whole job of this glossary.
Think of it as a working dictionary for the tabletop. It starts with the kind of game you are sitting down to play, a huge pitched battle or a tight little skirmish, then moves out across the battlefield, into the formations and tactics that decide who wins, and down to the individual soldiers doing the fighting and the handful of rules that push them around. The terms people go looking for most often, what a skirmish wargame is, what line of sight means, what pike and shot describes, why flanking matters so much, each get their own entry, written the way you would actually ask the question.
There is a reason those definitions land harder here than in most places. WoFun miniatures come pre-printed on plexiglass and press straight off the sprue. No painting. No assembly. No glue. So the gap between reading about a formation and watching it hold your table is a matter of minutes, not the months a traditional army swallows. Read "line infantry" or "heavy cavalry" here and you can have that exact regiment standing in front of you the same evening. If you want to put faces to the words, take a look through the full WoFun range and find the periods that pull at you.
You do not need to read this front to back. Dip in, look up the term that stopped you, and get back to the game. Keep it open beside a rulebook, or beside a collection page while you plan an army, and the language of the tabletop stops being a barrier fairly fast.
How wargames are played: game types and formats
The format you pick shapes everything else, from how many miniatures you need down to whether a single figure lives or dies on its own luck.
What is a wargame?
A wargame is a game that recreates military conflict, using miniatures, counters, or maps to stand in for troops and ground while the players make the decisions a real commander would face. Historical tabletop wargames pin that to a particular period or battle, and two or more players test their tactics against each other under an agreed rulebook.
What is a skirmish wargame?
A skirmish wargame is a small-scale game where each miniature usually stands for a single soldier, and a whole force might number a few dozen rather than a few thousand. Everything narrows to individual actions: who has cover, who moves first, who holds their nerve. They set up fast and finish inside an evening, which is why they suit newcomers so well. WoFun's VB and GS signature editions are built for exactly this, focused on the single figure.
Tactical (pitched battle) game
A tactical game, or pitched battle game, works at a bigger scale, where each stand of figures represents a whole unit instead of one man. Now you are handling regiments and brigades, out-thinking the player across the table. WoFun's PD, JP, and KC editions are cut for this style, with figurines grouped into formed bodies of men.
Campaign
A campaign strings a run of individual games into one connected story, carrying the wins, the losses, and the ground you took into the next. A single afternoon's game is a snapshot; a campaign is the whole war, rewarding the player who thinks past the fight in front of them to supply, reserves, and which veterans to spend.
Scenario
A scenario is the particular situation a single game sets up: who is fighting, on what ground, and for what objective. Some refight a real battle down to the terrain; others pose a what-if. Either way, it turns a box of miniatures into a problem to solve.
Reading the battlefield: terrain and position
Where a unit stands decides what it can do. These are the words for the ground itself and the way it bends a fight.
What is line of sight in wargaming?
Line of sight is the imaginary straight line between one unit and another, used to work out whether they can see each other and therefore shoot. Put a hill, a wood, or a farmhouse in the way and the line breaks: the target is hidden and cannot be fired on. It is the rule that stops terrain being mere scenery.
Terrain
Terrain is any feature of the battlefield that changes how troops move, what they can see, and how well they are protected: rivers, ridges, woods, walls, a huddle of buildings. A good player reads it constantly, using a ridge to hide an advance or a gap to funnel the enemy where they would rather not go.
Cover
Cover is terrain that shields troops from incoming fire and cuts down the shots that land. Put men behind a stone wall or down in a sunken lane and they trade the freedom to move for the safety of staying put. A few defenders in good cover can hold up a force many times their size.
Deployment zone
The deployment zone is the strip of table each player sets up in, usually one at each end of the field. How you lay your army out inside it, what you hide, where you put your weight, often settles the battle before either side has moved.
Flank
A flank is the side of a body of troops, left or right, as against its front. It is the soft spot, because troops face forward and fight best that way. Almost all tactics grow from that one fact: guard your own flanks, and work round the enemy's.
Formations and tactics
Formations are the shapes troops take to fight. Tactics are what a commander does with them.
Line
A line is a formation where troops stand shoulder to shoulder in one or two shallow ranks, so that as many muskets or blades as possible face the enemy at once. It throws more fire forward than any other formation, but it is slow to shift and horribly exposed the moment something strikes its side.
Column
A column is a deep, narrow formation, far longer front to back than wide, built for speed and for hitting one point hard. The French of the Napoleonic Wars made it notorious, flinging dense columns at an enemy line to punch through by sheer weight. You can put that old argument, column against line, on the table with the 10mm Napoleonic collection.
Square
A square is a hollow box of infantry, bayonets out on all four sides, formed for one reason: to beat off cavalry. Horses will not charge home into a solid hedge of points, so foot caught in the open would form square and dare them to try. The catch is that a tight-packed square makes a lovely target for artillery, as more than one battalion found at Waterloo.
What is flanking?
Flanking means striking the enemy on the side or the rear instead of head-on, where their fire is thinnest and they are slowest to turn. A clean flank attack can break a far stronger force in minutes. Wellington did exactly that to Marmont at Salamanca, wrecking half a French army in barely an hour. It is why so much of tactics comes down to flanks, yours and theirs.
Oblique order
Oblique order is a tactic where a commander loads one end of his line with strength, holds the other back, and comes in at an angle instead of straight along the whole front. Frederick the Great made it his own at Leuthen, where a smaller Prussian army rolled up a much larger one from the flank. The Seven Years' War collection is built around that Prussian drill.
What does pike and shot mean?
Pike and shot describes the way infantry fought from roughly 1500 to 1700, with blocks of long-speared pikemen guarding the "shot", the men carrying early muskets, from being ridden down by cavalry. Each arm covered the other's weakness. Across two centuries the balance tipped toward the gun, until the bayonet let one soldier be both pikeman and musketeer and the pike disappeared for good.
Skirmish order
Skirmish order, or open order, is a loose, spread-out formation in which troops fight as individuals instead of a solid block, using cover and speed to harass the enemy and screen their main body. Light and irregular troops lived in it, men like the Irish Kern mercenary warriors, lightly armoured and quick, who picked at a formed enemy instead of standing toe to toe.
Linear warfare and platoon fire
Linear warfare is the disciplined, line-against-line fighting that opened in the late 1600s, when armies stood at close range and traded controlled volleys. Often that meant platoon fire, sections of a battalion firing in sequence so a rolling wall of lead never quite stopped. The War of the Spanish Succession sits at the start of that era, its armies among the first to drill it properly.
Who fights: troop types
Every army is built from a few distinct kinds of soldier, each with a job. Learn the troop types and you can read any period's collection at a glance.
Line infantry
Line infantry are the trained, formed foot who make up the bulk of most gunpowder-era armies, standing in line to pour out massed musket fire and holding the ground everything else pivots on. One WoFun sprue of French Line Infantry carries twenty figurines at 28mm, forty at 18mm, a formed regiment ready to fight straight out of the packet.
Grenadiers
Grenadiers started as the biggest, steadiest men in a battalion, chosen to hurl early grenades, and hardened into elite assault troops sent where the fighting was worst. Beside them marched the voltigeurs, the light company's nimble skirmishers, and WoFun's voltigeurs and grenadiers set gathers both flank companies onto one sprue.
Heavy cavalry
Heavy cavalry are the big, armoured horsemen on powerful mounts, kept for the shock charge, when a wall of horseflesh hits a formation and caves it in. The cuirassier, breastplated in steel, is the type everyone pictures, and the French Line Cavalry Royal Cuirassiers set puts those battle-winners on one plexiglass sprue.
Light cavalry
Light cavalry are the fast, lightly kitted riders used for scouting, screening, chasing down a beaten enemy, and raiding, not the head-down charge. Hussars, all braid and swagger, are the ones people remember, and the 15th Hussars, the King's Hussars, bring that dash to a British Napoleonic force.
Artillery and battery
Artillery are the guns and the crews who serve them, the heavy hitters that break up formations long before they close. A battery is a group of those guns worked as one. The American Civil War turned massed batteries into something fearsome, and the American Civil War collection lets you line up the long-range firepower that tore across fields like Gettysburg.
Pikemen and musketeers
Pikemen carried spears up to eighteen feet long to fend off horsemen and shove against enemy blocks, while musketeers worked the early firearms that killed at range. For most of the seventeenth century the two shared a battalion, the pike buying the slow-loading musket the time it needed, until better guns and the bayonet retired the pike.
Longbowmen
Longbowmen were archers drawing the heavy English longbow, loosing arrows in thick, sky-darkening volleys that could wreck an advance before it arrived. In the Wars of the Roses the opposing archers usually shot each other to a standstill, and the battle was settled hand to hand.
The rules in play: game mechanics
A few core mechanics turn up in nearly every rulebook. They are the levers that turn history into a game you can win or lose.
Morale
Morale stands for a unit's will to keep fighting, tested when troops take casualties, get charged, or watch friends run. Battles are hardly ever fought to the last figure; they end when a shaken unit's nerve snaps and it routs. Holding your own men together matters as much as cutting the enemy's down.
Command and control
Command and control covers how your orders reach the troops and how freely they act once they have them, modelling the friction that stops any army moving like one machine. Some units jump the moment you call. Others sit on their hands. A general's reach is usually the scarcest thing you own.
Melee
Melee is close-up, hand-to-hand fighting, the business that happens when two units make contact instead of trading shots at a distance. Some periods live and die by it, none more so than the Wars of the Roses, whose battles came down to great heaving melees of billmen and armoured men-at-arms once the arrows had run out.
Army strength
Army strength, often written as points, totals up the fighting value of a force so two sides can be matched for a fair game. Balance the armies this way and the outcome turns on how well each player handles their troops, not on who brought more.
Scale, bases and the WoFun difference
The last few terms are about the miniatures themselves, and this is where WoFun does things a little differently from the rest of the hobby.
Scale
Scale is the height of a miniature, measured in millimetres from foot to eye, with 10mm, 18mm, and 28mm the common tabletop sizes. Go smaller and whole armies fit on an ordinary table, suiting big sweeping battles. Go larger and every figure shows off its detail, suiting closer, character-led games.
Base and basing
A base is the little stand a figure or group of figures sits on, holding them steady and turning loose miniatures into a unit you can move as one. Basing is the job of mounting them, and WoFun's pre-cut, slotted bases let a figure drop straight into place, so one of the hobby's fiddlier chores all but vanishes.
Sprue
A sprue is the single sheet a set of figurines is printed and cut on. For WoFun that sheet is a piece of plexiglass, fifteen by twenty centimetres, usually holding one regiment or unit. The figures push out cleanly and stand on their bases with nothing left to build.
Pre-printed and ready-to-play
Pre-printed means the colour, the faces, and the detail are already on the plexiglass when it reaches you. Ready-to-play is what that gets you: figures that need no paint, no assembly, and no glue. It is the whole idea behind WoFun, and it lets a word you read here become an army on your table the same day you open the box.
Where to go next
A glossary only takes you so far. The words come alive on a table, in a period you love. Send the column in against the line with the Napoleonic regiments. Drill the oblique order with the armies of the Seven Years' War. Loose the first disciplined volleys in the War of the Spanish Succession. Roll out the massed guns of the American Civil War, or set billmen and men-at-arms loose in the melee of the Wars of the Roses. Every figure presses ready from the sprue, so the only thing left to work out is how to win.