There is a moment, well-documented in the accounts of soldiers who survived it, that precedes the cavalry charge by several seconds. Before the enemy is visible, before the command is even given, the ground begins to vibrate. The vibration travels up through the soles of boots, through knees, through the belly, a physical communication that something enormous and fast is approaching and cannot be stopped by willpower alone. Soldiers who had stood fire, who had watched friends carried off the field, who had held formation under artillery bombardment, broke at that trembling of the earth. The charge had not yet arrived. The fear arrived first.
That psychological dimension is what separated mounted troops from every other arm. Infantry could threaten. Artillery could destroy at distance. Only cavalry could make the enemy feel, in the literal physical sense, that the decision had already been made before the fighting began. From the first organised horse armies of the ancient world to the last Cossack columns probing Central Asian passes in the nineteenth century, the mounted soldier carried this advantage: the charge was not merely a military act. It was a performance of inevitability.
Across more than two millennia of military history, cavalry executed three functions. The first was shock, the concentrated charge that broke a formed line or drove through a gap before it could close. The second was pursuit, the conversion of a repulse into a rout, chasing a retreating enemy past the point where they could regroup. The third was screening, the denial of information and approach routes, the patrol that told a commander what the enemy was doing before the enemy knew what the commander was doing. Every cavalry force in history balanced those three functions differently. Some, like Alexander's Macedonian Companions, existed almost entirely for the shock of a single decisive charge. Others, like the Mongol horse archers, wove all three functions into a single fluid system. Still others, like the Maratha bargir raiding across the Deccan plain, used light horsemen as a strategic instrument rather than a battlefield arm at all.
WoFun's catalog spans this entire geography, from Gaugamela to the Khyber Pass, from the sarissa-armed Companion to the Cossack reading a mountain trail. What follows is a journey through six collections, six eras, and the same three questions that every commander of horse ever asked. Visit WoFunGames.com to explore the full range.
The Hammer and the Wedge, Antiquity (PD)
In 331 BC, at Gaugamela, Alexander of Macedon executed one of the most architecturally precise cavalry actions in recorded history. The battle's design had two moving parts. The Macedonian phalanx, sixteen ranks of sarissa-armed infantry, advancing in a wall of overlapping spear points, was the anvil. Its job was not to destroy. Its job was to hold the Persian centre in place, to deny it freedom of manoeuvre, to create and maintain the gap that Alexander needed. The Companions were the hammer. Four bases of armoured heavy cavalry, wedge formation, armed with the same long thrusting sarissa that gave them reach over Persian horsemen before contact was even made. When the gap opened, Alexander drove the wedge through it and aimed directly at Darius's personal command. The Persian king fled. The army followed. The battle was over before the flanks had resolved.
This is the template. Not the general cavalry engagement, not the pursuit, not the flanking movement, those came later. The template was the single committed charge at the decisive point, timed to arrive exactly when the phalanx had made the position untenable. It required discipline sufficient to hold the heavy horse back until the moment was real, then courage sufficient to give everything at once. Nothing was held in reserve. The Companions were not a reserve. They were the decision.
Peter Dennis's Antiquity (PD) collection covers the Macedonian, Greek, and Persian armies with the tactical grouping format that defines his historical work, figures already printed, organised in ranks that reflect how these forces actually fought. The Macedonian Companion Cavalry add-on is a single 15×20cm Plexiglass sprue carrying 24 figures at 28mm scale, or 48 at 18mm, heavy armoured horsemen with the sarissa, in two ranks, ready to slot into MDF bases and reach the table without a paintbrush. The Wars of Alexander the Great rules model the Companions' decisive advantage directly: sarissa-armed cavalry get the "Strike First" rule in any fight, rolling their combat dice and forcing the enemy to absorb casualties before being allowed to respond. On the charge, they also re-roll any 1s and 2s, a combination that makes the opening blow disproportionately lethal regardless of numbers.
The Wars of Alexander the Great StarterPack, available in both 28mm (78 bases) and 18mm, places the Macedonian and Persian armies together on the table and includes Andy Callan's wargaming rules as a downloadable PDF. The Macedonian force is built around heavy cavalry and phalanx infantry; the Persian army is structured around long-range archery with the option to add Camel regiments. Players who want the full strategic palette of this period can build up to the Antiquity Full Pack, available at both scales, which extends the collection to 1,786 characters across 25 sprues at 18mm, covering Macedonian light infantry, Persian Kardakes, Scythed Chariots, and the full range of Persian horse archer types alongside the main phalanx and cavalry units.
The Circle of Death, Mongol Invasion (PD)
The question that defeated every other horse culture of the medieval world was this: cavalry is decisive, but once you commit it, you have committed it. The charge that breaks an enemy line often carries the breaking cavalry off the battlefield with it. The pursuit that converts a repulse into a rout often ends with the pursuing force fragmented, winded, and vulnerable. How do you use horse as both the screen and the decisive arm without losing control of which role it is playing at any given moment?
The Mongol system answered this by refusing to commit the decisive arm until the enemy had already psychologically collapsed. Their horse archer units did not charge. They circled. A six-base unit split into two echelons, three skirmishing forward and three in a closed support line behind them, rotating continuously, shooting in both the shooting phase and the movement phase of each game turn, rolling a combined twelve dice per turn with a full 360-degree arc of fire. The enemy could not charge them without exposing a flank. They could not stand still without being steadily attrited. If attacked, the forward skirmishers evaded and fired a Parthian shot as they retreated. The purpose was not to kill efficiently. The purpose was to exhaust, disorder, and fragment an enemy formation until it had lost the psychological coherence to resist. Only then did the armoured heavy cavalry come forward. In close combat, horse archers needed a 6 to hit enemy horsemen, the rules correctly encode that this arm could not win in melee. It was not designed to. The heavy cavalry existed for that.
The Mongol Invasion (PD) collection, illustrated by Peter Dennis and covering the Mongol expansion of the 1220s through the 1240s, places both echelons on the table. The Mongol Horse Archers sprue carries 24 mounted bowmen at 28mm (or 48 at 18mm) per 15×20cm sheet, the harassment arm. The Mongol Heavy Cavalry sprue carries 20 armoured horsemen at 28mm (or 40 at 18mm), the killing arm. Building both as separate forces allows the full Mongol system to be reproduced on the table: the circling screen applying pressure, the heavy horse waiting at the rear of the deployment, committed only when the enemy formation has begun to come apart.
The Full Pack at 28mm contains 1,074 ready-to-play figures across 38 Plexiglass sprues, Mongol, Russian, Polish, Bulgar, and Lithuanian troops, plus armed peasant and militia units versatile enough to appear in dozens of other medieval wargaming scenarios beyond the Mongol campaign specifically. The 18mm Full Pack doubles the figurine count across the same number of sprues, making it one of the most economical ways to field a complete 13th-century steppe empire at the scale suited to formation-level play. What makes this collection distinctive, beyond the tactical depth, is the breadth of the defending forces: the Russian princes, the Bulgar horsemen, the Lithuanian infantry all bring their own fighting styles and can be assembled as coherent opposing armies rather than as token resistance.
The Doctrine Experiment, Seven Years War (PD)
The Seven Years War is the most forensically documented cavalry doctrine laboratory in military history, and it produced a clear result. Between 1756 and 1763, Prussian and Austrian cavalry fought on the same terrain, in the same battles, against the same opponents, and reached completely opposite conclusions about how mounted troops should attack.
Frederick the Great's approach was absolute. His cavalry was forbidden from discharging firearms before contact. Officers who allowed their men to fire before closing were considered to have failed. The Prussian charge was delivered at maximum speed with every intention of striking with cold steel before the enemy had time to organise a coherent response. The Austrians did the opposite. A volley of pistol fire just before contact, rolling dice hitting only on a 6, any hits counting toward the outcome, bled the momentum of the charge and left their horsemen fighting at reduced effect even as the attacker. The historical record and Andy Callan's wargaming rules agree: the Prussian method consistently produced better outcomes. A Prussian squadron attacking for the first time hits for 3, 4, 5, or 6 in the first round. An Austrian squadron that has fired first hits for only 5 or 6 in the subsequent fight, even when it initiated the charge. Doctrine is not decoration. It changes the dice.
The cavalry taxonomy of this period is also more complex than shock alone. Cuirassiers, Austrian and Prussian heavy armoured horsemen, carry a saving throw in cavalry-versus-cavalry fights, ignoring hits on a 5 or 6, representing their armoured advantage in sustained close combat. Hussars, by contrast, are classified as Light Cavalry: they move at 10 base widths, roll 2 dice per company against other light horse or skirmishers, but only 1 die against heavier mounted troops. Their role is not the decisive charge. Their role is screening flanks, running down worn-out units, raiding baggage trains, and forcing the enemy commander to keep reserves back that he would rather commit. Kalmyk Cossacks and Serbian Hussars add irregular cavalry fringe, the eastern theatre's answer to the question of what happened when the clean doctrine of the western campaigns met terrain and opponents who did not follow the manual.
The Seven Years War (PD) collection gives access to all of this. The StarterPack at 18mm, 58 bases, cavalry, infantry, and artillery units included, with the Andy Callan rules available as a free download, is the fastest entry into 18th-century horse-and-musket wargaming. The 28mm StarterPack offers the same forces at a scale where uniform detail and individual facial expressions become more visible. For players who want to build toward the campaign-level scope the Seven Years War demands, the Full Pack at 18mm covers the complete collection including Russian Musketeers, Corps of Observation Grenadiers, and Serbian Hussars. The Full Pack at 28mm is one of the largest single-era sets WoFun produces: 4,532 characters across 123 Plexiglass sprues, with Kalmyk Cossacks, Baranjay Hussars, and Austrian Carabiniers-Elite Cuirassiers alongside the main infantry and gun batteries. That range of mounted troop types, heavy cuirassiers, light hussars, Cossack irregulars, accurately reflects what the Seven Years War looked like in its eastern theatres, where the conflict dissolved from pitched engagement into raid, counter-raid, and the perpetual probing of extended flanks.
Steel and the Limit of Success, Napoleonic (WoF)
The Napoleonic era did not invent the cavalry charge. It refined it to a point of near-perfection, institutionalised the different roles of different mounted arm types, and then demonstrated with catastrophic precision what happened when those roles were confused. Cuirassiers existed for shock: armoured, heavy, designed to break enemy horse or exploit a collapsing infantry line. Hussars and chasseurs existed for screening and skirmishing. Lancers existed for pursuit, the lance's reach giving them a decisive advantage over a fleeing horseman who could not defend his back. The system was coherent. The problem was that the system assumed the officers executing it would know when to stop.
At Waterloo, the British Household and Union Brigades delivered one of the most effective cavalry charges of the entire war. They broke through French infantry, captured two eagles, and drove deep into the French position. Then they kept going. Carried by momentum, unable or unwilling to disengage, they rode so far past their objective that they arrived at the French gun line exhausted and scattered, were cut down by lancers on the return, and ceased to exist as a fighting force for the rest of the day. The charge that won the moment cost the battle two elite brigades. The pursuit rule in Callan's Peninsular War rules makes this inescapable: roll 1, 2, or 3, and a victorious cavalry regiment must pursue at 10 base widths for that many turns. British Cavalry always pursue unless they roll a 6. Ride off the table edge and you do not come back.
The Napoleonic WoF collection is one of the broadest in WoFun's catalogue, covering nine major powers, French, British, Austrian, Russian, Prussian, Dutch, Hanoverian, Nassau, and Brunswick, in both their 1805 and 1815 uniform variants, illustrated in-house with larger-headed figures designed to make individual facial expressions legible at gaming distance. Available in 18mm and 28mm, it is the collection for players who want the full European canvas of the period. For an immediate two-army entry point with cavalry-specific rules built in, the Peninsular War StarterPack at 28mm, 387 characters across 10 Plexiglass sprues with Andy Callan's downloadable PDF rules, places British and French forces on the table including the cuirassiers, hussars, chasseurs, dragoons, and Polish Lancers that define the period's cavalry variety. The same pack is available in 18mm for the more economical option; the Peninsular War Full Pack at 28mm covers the entire collection at that scale.
The rules themselves carry the tactical distinctions that make this period so rich for tabletop play. Heavy Cavalry, French Cuirassiers, British and KGL Heavy Dragoons, always counts as first-class troops and rolls a saving throw against any hit in a fight, ignoring it on a 5 or 6: the armour advantage modelled in dice rather than description. Light Cavalry moves faster (12 base widths when charging) but counts as the loser in any drawn fight against heavier horse, the speed-versus-staying-power tradeoff that hussars and chasseurs operated within every time they met cuirassiers. Polish Lancers re-roll missed hits in the first round of any charge, the lance's geometry translated into a single mechanical rule. And French first-class cavalry may choose whether or not to pursue a beaten enemy. British cavalry, historically, could not make that choice, and the rule reflects it.
For players wanting a third ruleset option tied directly to the WoF figurines, the Soldiers of Napoleon Game Pack provides 1,994 figures and 411 pre-cut bases across French, Prussian, and Russian armies in 18mm scale, designed for Warwick Kinrade's Soldiers of Napoleon rules, a useful companion for clubs and groups already using that system.
The Whirlwind Strategists, Maratha (KC)
There is a tendency to assume that cavalry meant the same thing everywhere, that it was always a battlefield arm, always measured in charges and pursuit, always evaluated by what it could do to formed infantry in the open. The Maratha military system of seventeenth and eighteenth-century India demonstrates that this assumption is wrong. Shivaji Bhonsle did not build one of the most successful military empires in South Asian history by fighting on anyone else's terms. His Bargir light cavalry could cover forty to fifty miles of Deccan terrain in a single day, a speed that confounded slower opponents entirely, not because it won engagements but because it made engagements impossible to force. Supply routes were severed. Rear areas became hostile. Armies that could not be beaten in the field could be starved of everything necessary to operate. The Marathas were not using horsemen as a support arm. They were using mobility itself as the primary instrument of power.
This doctrine had limits that only became visible when it was abandoned. At the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, the Maratha Confederacy deployed approximately 45,000 cavalry far from home, against Afghan heavy horse under Ahmad Shah Durrani, in a set-piece engagement their system was not designed to fight. The Bargir could not match Afghan armoured horsemen in direct shock. The artillery proved effective in the opening barrage, but without the cavalry weight to exploit gaps, the Maratha line eventually broke. The catastrophe was not a failure of courage. It was a failure to fight within the doctrine that had made the empire.
The Maratha collection, a KC Signature Edition covering the Wellington in India period, commissioned by WoFun supporter Kevin Cunningham and illustrated by historian-illustrator Darius Buraczewski, captures this mixed-arms system in complete form. The Full Pack at 28mm contains 563 individually illustrated figures across 16 Plexiglass sprues: Bargir light cavalry, Telinga infantry equipped with matchlocks visible in the figurine detail, artillery operated by European-trained gunners, and command figures reflecting the confederate structure of the empire. The 18mm version of the Full Pack covers the same complete range at a scale better suited to the larger engagements of the Anglo-Maratha Wars period. For players looking to refight those Anglo-Maratha conflicts with opposing forces, the Expansion Pack at 28mm adds 178 figures on 10 sprues covering Sikh and Muslim forces, completing the military panorama of northern India during this era and allowing the full spectrum of the period's factional warfare to be recreated on the table.
The Last Horsemen, Great Game (VB)
By the 1870s, the breech-loading rifle had changed the arithmetic of the cavalry charge against formed infantry to the point of making it nearly suicidal in most terrain. The Great Game, the decades-long competition for influence between Britain and Russia across Central Asia, is where mounted troops made their last unambiguous strategic claim, and that claim was no longer about the battlefield at all. It was about presence and information.
Russian Cossack columns could operate across Central Asian terrain and over distances that collapsed the supply networks a conventional British force required. Afghan horsemen could mass in the mountain approaches and dissolve back through passes before any organised pursuit could be mounted. The British cavalry and political officers who rode ahead of any main force were doing the same work in reverse: gathering intelligence, maintaining visible presence in territories that a heavier column could not reach quickly enough to matter. The Great Game was not settled in pitched engagements. It was settled in the information gathered by the mounted patrol and the ground that remained accessible to the rider when it had long since become inaccessible to the formation. This is the cavalry at the end of its age of dominance, still indispensable, but indispensable as an intelligence instrument rather than a shock arm.
The Great Game (VB) collection, illustrated by Vyacheslav Batalov in his characteristic side-perspective style, inspired by the traditional approach to flat metal figure painting, covers Russian, Afghan, British, and Central Asian state forces in the 1865–1880 period. As a VB Signature Edition, it is designed for individual-figure skirmish wargaming: infantry bases are round (20mm diameter at 28mm scale), cavalry bases are rectangular (20×48mm), and each figure is illustrated laterally with the clothing, arms, and accessories of the period, making the collection immediately compatible with rules systems where individual soldiers matter rather than formed stands. The Full Pack at 28mm contains 359 figures on 23 sprues, a complete operational force covering all four factions, and the 18mm version covers the same range at the smaller scale. For players who want to build the Russian cavalry arm specifically, the Red and Blue Cossack Cavalry set contains 175 figures representing the diversity of Cossack host regiments that operated in Central Asia during this period. The Middle Eastern Heavy Cavalry covers the Afghan and Turkestani horsemen who made the border regions so difficult to read, individually based, skirmish-ready, suited to the patrol and counter-patrol scenarios that defined the Great Game at ground level.
The Same Three Questions
The Companion's sarissa charge at Gaugamela and the Cossack patrol reading a mountain pass in Turkestan are separated by more than two thousand years. They are separated by geography, religion, technology, scale, and military culture entirely unlike one another. What they share is a set of questions that every commander of mounted troops from Alexander to Skobelev asked before every action: Where do I strike? How far do I chase? What am I hiding?
The answers changed with every era, and every change is visible, in the figurines, in the rules, in the collections that WoFun has assembled across six periods of cavalry history. The Companion is designed to deliver one decisive blow. The Mongol horse archer is designed to never be caught delivering any blow at all until the enemy has already broken. The Prussian hussar and the Austrian cuirassier embody the same era's opposite convictions about when to fire and when to trust cold steel. The Maratha Bargir asks the question differently: not where do I strike the battle but where do I strike the campaign. And the Great Game cavalryman asks something else entirely, not how to break the enemy's line, but how to see what the enemy is doing before the enemy sees what he is.
All of it is on the table.