Most Waterloo games are not really Waterloo. They are Hougoumont. Or La Haye Sainte. Or a handful of squares on a ridge waiting for Ney's horsemen, with the rest of the battle left to the imagination.
There is a good reason for that. On 18 June 1815 three armies fought across a stretch of Belgian farmland about four kilometres wide, and the Prussians spent the whole afternoon arriving from somewhere off the edge of the map. Try that at 28mm and you need a church hall, a run of trestle tables and friends with a free weekend. Most of us have a dining table and a Saturday afternoon.
So players cut the battle down. They pick a corner, fight it well and call it Waterloo. The games are fun, but something quietly goes missing: the distance between things. Wellington's day depended on two farms holding out more than a kilometre apart. Napoleon's day depended on how long a village behind his right flank could keep the Prussians busy. Lose the space and you lose the story.
This is where the choice of scale stops being a matter of taste. Shrink the figures to 10mm and the whole field comes back. Hougoumont, the Grand Battery, the farm on the Brussels road, the Prussian flank march: all of it fits on a cloth of roughly 90 by 120 centimetres. That is a footprint most family tables handle without pulling out the extra leaf.
WoFun makes this easier than it has any right to be, because its figures are flat plexiglass soldiers that arrive ready to fight. They come printed in full colour. You press them off the sprue and slot them into a base. No painting. No assembly. No glue. When a single battle asks for dozens of battalions a side, that matters more than it sounds. Nobody wants to spend six months painting Hanoverian militia before the first dice are thrown.
What follows looks at what 10mm actually changes on the table, why Waterloo shows it better than any other battle, and how Peter Dennis's figures let you fight the whole day, from the first shots in the Hougoumont woods to the last advance of the Guard. If you have been searching for Waterloo miniatures that cover the entire battle rather than one famous corner of it, this is the scale to look at.
The Battle That Never Fit the Table
How big was the battlefield at Waterloo?
Smaller than most people expect, and far bigger than a table at the usual wargaming scales. Wellington's line ran for roughly four kilometres along the ridge south of Mont-Saint-Jean. The whole fight, Prussians included, took place in an area you could cross on foot in about an hour.
Inside that space the key points sat a long way apart. On the Allied right stood Hougoumont, a walled chateau and farm with a formal garden, an orchard and a wood in front of it. In the centre, right beside the Brussels road, was the farm of La Haye Sainte. Out on the left lay Papelotte and La Haye, and beyond them the country lanes the Prussians would eventually use. Behind the French right flank sat the village of Plancenoit, which by evening had become a battle in its own right.
The day moved across all of them. Fighting began at Hougoumont before midday and never really stopped. Napoleon massed some eighty guns into a Grand Battery and sent d'Erlon's corps up the slope in the early afternoon, only for the British heavy cavalry to break it and then gallop on much too far. Ney threw wave after wave of horsemen at the Allied squares. La Haye Sainte fell in the early evening, after its King's German Legion garrison ran short of ammunition. By then Bülow's Prussians were fighting their way into Plancenoit, and Napoleon had to send the Young Guard, then battalions of the Old Guard, to hold it.
That is the wargamer's problem in a nutshell. Every one of those moments pulled on the others. Take one away and the rest stop making sense.
What Shrinking the Figures Really Changes
What is 10mm scale in wargaming?
10mm scale means the figures stand about ten millimetres tall, roughly the height of a fingernail. It belongs to the grand tactical end of the hobby, where one base stands for a whole battalion or cavalry regiment and the player thinks like an army commander rather than a company officer.
That might sound like a modest change. In practice three things shift at once.
The first is frontage. WoFun's 10mm bases are 43 millimetres wide, so a 120 centimetre table takes about 27 of them side by side. Spread that width over Wellington's four kilometres of ridge and each base covers something like 140 metres of real ground. A British battalion of around 550 men, standing two deep, needed a frontage in the same neighbourhood. The sums are rough, and they are ours rather than any official ground scale, but the point holds. At this size a base and a battalion take up about the same share of the field, so the line on your table looks like the line on the map.
The second is depth. With room behind the front you can keep a second line, hold cavalry back and leave a flank open for someone to march onto. Those were the decisions that won and lost Napoleonic battles. At larger scales they tend to be the first things squeezed out.
The third is mass. Each sprue packs its soldiers into tight blocks, so a brigade looks like a brigade and a column looks like a column. You get the rippling spectacle of a Napoleonic army without needing a spare room to store it.
All of this rests on Peter Dennis's 10mm Napoleonic range, which covers the French, British, Prussian, Austrian and Russian armies up to 1809. Dennis has spent decades drawing soldiers for tactical games, and it shows. The figures read clearly from arm's length, which is exactly what you want when your eye is on the whole field rather than on one man's buttons. For anyone weighing up 10mm Napoleonic miniatures for the first time, that clarity is usually the pleasant surprise.
Hougoumont to Plancenoit on One Cloth
Can you fight the whole Battle of Waterloo on a normal table?
You can, and the easiest way to see it is to walk the table from one end to the other.
Stand behind the French lines, facing north. Hougoumont is on your left, perhaps a hand's span in from the table edge, with Reille's corps ready to pour battalions into its woods and orchard all day. Move to the middle and you hit the Brussels road, running straight up the table, with La Haye Sainte just in front of the Allied ridge. The Grand Battery lines the slope in front of you. Further right, Papelotte and La Haye anchor Wellington's left. Then, on the far right and closer to your own edge, comes Plancenoit, where the Prussians will arrive from the east once the afternoon wears on.
Everything is within reach. More to the point, everything is in play at the same time. You feel Hougoumont draining away French infantry. You watch the Prussians creep closer while the Guard is still standing in reserve, and you have to decide when to commit it. The famous choices of the day stop being trivia and become your problem.
For 1815 you want the armies as they looked in 1815, and that is the job of the 10mm Waterloo extension. It brings the later French alongside the troops who made up so much of Wellington's army: Dutch and Belgian infantry and cavalry, Nassauers, Brunswickers in their black uniforms, and Hanoverians in both line and Landwehr regiments. It is easy to forget that well under half of the men on that ridge were British. At 10mm you can finally put the real mix on the table without first losing a year to the paintbrush.
The Guard gets the same attention. All six Guard infantry regiments are there, and so are the gunners. The Imperial Guard Artillery sprue carries 48 figures, enough to stand a proper reserve of heavy guns behind the Grand Battery, which is where the Emperor liked to keep his best artillery until the moment it was needed.
The Hundred Days in One Box
What was the Hundred Days campaign?
The Hundred Days is the name given to Napoleon's return from exile in 1815, the short and frantic stretch between his arrival back in Paris in March and the restoration of Louis XVIII that summer.
It began as a gamble. At the end of February Napoleon slipped away from Elba with around a thousand men, landed on the southern coast of France on 1 March and marched north. The soldiers sent to arrest him joined him instead. By 20 March he was back in the Tuileries, and the rest of Europe was mobilising against him.
He could not sit and wait for the Austrians and Russians. His best chance was to hit the two armies already in Belgium, Wellington's and Blücher's, before they could combine. On 15 June the French crossed the frontier around Charleroi. The next day brought two battles at once: Napoleon beat the Prussians at Ligny while Ney fought Wellington to a standstill at Quatre Bras. Two days later came Waterloo, with Grouchy's wing held up by a Prussian rearguard at Wavre, too far off to help. Within a week Napoleon had abdicated for the second time.
As a campaign it is close to ideal for the tabletop. It is short. It has four linked battles. Each one is a different puzzle, and the result of one shapes the next.
The Hundred Days Campaign Full Pack brings every regiment in the 10mm Waterloo range together in a single order: 6,710 figures on 33 plexiglass sprues. The Guard alone is quite a sight. Grenadiers, Chasseurs, Fusiliers, Fusilier Chasseurs, Tirailleurs and Voltigeurs form the infantry, and behind them ride the Grenadiers à Cheval, the Empress Dragoons, the Guard Chasseurs, the Mamelukes, the Gendarmes d'Élite and two regiments of lancers.
The Allied side is every bit as full. There are Hanoverian and Brunswick hussars, Dutch and Belgian carabiniers, light dragoons and hussars, and infantry from the Netherlands, Nassau, Brunswick and Hanover. Artillery for both armies, a set of limbers and a sprue of Allied and French leaders round it off.
You also choose how it is based. The Standard A option comes with 283 square bases of 43 by 43 millimetres. Standard B comes with 526 bases, the infantry and cavalry on narrower 43 by 21 millimetre rectangles, which suits players who like to show lines and columns more literally. Either way, the figures slot straight in and you can start with Quatre Bras the same week the parcel arrives.
The Infantry That Built the Empire
Every Napoleonic army was, first and last, a mass of line infantry. The Guard made the headlines, but it was the ordinary French foot soldier who marched from the Channel coast to the Danube and fought at Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland and Wagram.
Those are the men on the French line infantry sprue from the core 10mm collection, and it is no accident that so many French armies start here. A single sheet carries 306 figures, with either 6 square or 12 rectangular bases. One set gives you a respectable brigade. Two or three give you a division, ready to go forward in column behind a screen of skirmishers the way the armies of 1805 did.
A word on uniforms, because Napoleonic players will ask. The core collection shows the French as they looked up to 1809, in the older style of coat. From 1812 the French army began moving to a new uniform pattern, and many regiments wore it by 1815. So this sprue is at its best in the great campaigns between Austerlitz and Wagram, while the Waterloo extension looks after the French of the Hundred Days. Plenty of players shrug at the difference at this size. If it matters to you, at least you know which army belongs where.
Beyond Mont-Saint-Jean
Waterloo is the showpiece, but the same argument holds for every big battle of the period. Austerlitz, with the fog lifting off the Pratzen Heights. Wagram, then the largest battle Europe had ever seen. Borodino, where the Russian army stood and bled under Napoleon's attacks in 1812. Leipzig in 1813, the Battle of the Nations, fought over several days by armies so large they spread across a ring of villages.
None of these is a corner-of-the-table affair. All of them come alive at 10mm, and because the core range covers five nations you can build towards them one army at a time. Austrians make an obvious second army for anyone who starts with the French. Prussians are the natural partner for anyone who starts with Waterloo and wants to march on Plancenoit properly.
Getting a 10mm Army on the Table
Which bases suit 10mm Napoleonic figures?
WoFun offers two standard layouts, and the choice really comes down to how you like your units to look. Standard A uses square 43 by 43 millimetre bases, which keeps things quick and tidy. Standard B gives you twice as many bases at half the depth, 43 by 21 millimetres, so a battalion can stand in a long line and then close up into a column when it moves forward.
Both are cut from 2.5 millimetre MDF, printed with a grass texture and slotted in advance for the figures. If you are adding to an army you already own, or want spares for casualty markers and command stands, the pre-slotted 10mm bases are also sold on their own.
Setting up is honestly the quickest part of the whole business. Press a strip of soldiers out, push it into its slot, move on to the next. An afternoon is enough to get a sizeable force ready, and the time you save is time spent actually playing.
A Whole Battle, One Table
Waterloo has been refought on tabletops for as long as there has been a hobby, and most of those games told part of the story. At 10mm you can tell all of it: the slow grind at Hougoumont, the thin line on the ridge, the Prussians pushing in from the east and the Guard climbing the slope at the very end of the day.
You already own the table. Clear the plates away and see what you would have done in the Emperor's place.