MiniatureWargaming has entered its sixth year of operation.
I started MiniatureWargaming as an attempt to organize and share all of the miniature wargaming related links in my favorites folder. It has since taken on a life of its own. There are, as of this writing, 3,672 categorized, indexed and searchable blog entries. Each entry contains a link to a useful—and free—wargaming resource, and a brief description of what you’ll find there. There are links to free rules, painting guides, terrain tips, modeling hints, scenarios, paper figures and terrain, historical resources and other fun and useful stuff.
In addition, the Miniature Wargaming Directory lists more than 30,000 wargaming related websites in 3629 categories. There’s also a gallery, a wiki and a forum that has some very helpful and friendly people as regulars.
Here are some other numbers for the last five years:
* 3, 672 blog posts
* 30,321 sites listed in the directory
* 6, 954, 995 Visitors
A new focus for this year is a special section of the forums for businesses to post about miniature wargaming related product release, sales and so forth. The headlines of the most recent entries appear on all of the pages of the blog. It’s free and I hope will be a useful new way for wargaming businesses to promote their products in these hard financial times.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit. The fact that so many have found the site useful is a source of never ending amazement and pride.
After two weeks of work, MiniatureWargaming.Com is back and fully functional! (I hope)
The initial problem began with a hacker’s attack two weeks ago. Fortunately, I had a recent mysql database backup, and the site was initially back up in less than 24 hours.
MiniatureWargaming heads into its fifth year of operation today.
I started MiniatureWargaming as an attempt to organize and share all of the miniature wargaming related links in my “favorites” folder. It has since taken on a life of its own. There are, as of this writing, 3,264 categorized, indexed and searchable blog entries. Each entry contains a link to a useful—and free—wargaming resource, and a brief description of what you’ll find there. There are links to free rules, painting guides, terrain tips, modeling hints, scenarios, paper figures and terrain, historical resources and other fun and useful stuff.
In addition, the Miniature Wargaming Directory lists more than 30,000 wargaming related websites in 3629 categories. There’s also a gallery, a wiki and a forum that has some very helpful and friendly people as regulars.
Here are some other numbers for the last four years:
* 3,264 blog posts
* 30,321 sites listed in the directory
* 192, 746, 357 Hits
* 4, 818, 674 Visitors
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit. The fact that so many have found the site useful is a source of never ending amazement and pride.
Through the magic of Google, I’ve created the first miniature wargaming specific search engine. It works just like a regular search engine—in fact, it runs on Google—but it returns results only from the 3,214 websites that I have identified as being of interest to miniature wargamers.
I’ve upgraded the software for the Miniature Wargaming Wiki. Its now running off the same membership system as the forums. So if you have a forum membership, you also can add and edit material in the Miniature Wargaming MiniPedia.
The Minipedia an online, collaborative encyclopedia in which miniature gamers can add and edit articles with helpful advice and information for other wargamers. Technically, it’s a “wiki” like the famous Wikipedia.
The best part of it is that anyone can participate. Just visit the site, and find an area in which you’d like to add to the collective knowledge. If there’s already a page, you can click “edit” and add more information, or edit the information that’s already there. If there isn’t an appropriate page, you can easily create a new one.
To format the text, you can use basic HTML code.
There are already a bunch of articles on the site. You can edit and add to these, or create new ones of your own.
Give it a try. I’ve high hopes that by tapping the collective knowledge of thousands of wargamers, we can create a truly useful encyclopedia.
Now that it’s the weekend, I’ve had a chance to look at the numbers for VSF month at http://www.miniaturewargaming.com , and the results were terrific:
MiniatureWargaming set a new site record during VSF Month with 112,290 visits from 43,350 unique individuals. That’s an average of 3,622 pages delivered to 1,398 unique visitors each day.
For those of you who count things in the “hits” statistic, the site had 1,165,461 hits in the month of January. (Hits are less meaningful and are higher because “hits” include each element of the page as it’s loaded. Each time a page with 3 photos, two blocks of text and a banner ad is loaded by a visitor, that counts as 6 hits).
During the month, I posted 45 links to VSF related sites, as well as 32 links to resources for other miniature wargaming genres. That brought the total number of posts on the site up to 1,434. There also are more than 30,000 links to related sites now listed in the sites directory.
Remember that you can always find older links on the site by using the search, or browsing through the various categories.
I’ve created a new experimental section on the site to help publicize other Miniature Wargaming bloggers. I’ve taken their RSS and Atom feeds and have posted them on a series of three pages. Now you can browse their headlines in one place, and then visit the sites that interest you. It’s a good way to discover some new and truly worthy blogs.
I’m in the process of collecting Victorian Science Fiction / Steampunk links for an upcoming special event. During the month of December (or maybe January, depending upon how fast I collect them), I plan to feature a different VSF link every day—in addition to the regular daily link.
I’m looking for links to VSF rules sets, rules modifications, tips on modeling, conversions and terrain, figure reviews, scenarios and photogalleries. Actually, I’d love to see practically anything as long as it’s VSF oriented. The only other rule is that it has to be “non-commercial” (although free add-ons for commercial stuff is fine, e.g. scenarios for GASLIGHT).
If you’ve got a webpage (or two ... or three) with VSF materials, this is your chance to promote it (them). Click on the contact form above to send them to the editor.
Miniature Wargaming is part of the "adventure games" hobby, which includes r ole p laying and board games. Wargamers recreate battles on the tabletop with toy soldiers, like a more complicated game of chess. Models range in height from 6mm to 28mm tall, with 15mm and 25mm being the most popular. There also is a growing interest in toy soldiers and military models, such as the 1/32 and 1/35 scale plastic soldiers from Conte, and Marx.
The most popular miniature wargames are fantasy and science fiction based, such as Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, Warmachine and The Lord of the Rings. World War II games such as Flames of War and Axis and Allies are new favorites. Other favorite historical periods include Napoleonics, the American Civil War, and ancients, such as Romans or Greeks. Other gamers enjoy miniature naval wargames, recreating battles like Trafalgar, Jutland and the Coral Sea.
Hobbyists research historical periods and paint their tiny soldiers in accurate uniforms. Others develop "historically realistic" rules sets or build scale battlefield terrain using model railroad techniques.
For pictures, visit the gallery.
Some of the bigger hobby companies are Games Workshop, which produces Warhammer, Wargames Foundry and Old Glory Miniatures. Wizards of the Coast produces several lines of pre-painted miniatures games, such as the Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons miniatures games, and a historical game with pre-painted miniatures: The new Axis and Allies game. Wizkids produces a fantasy collectable miniatures game, such as the Mage Knight and Heroclick fantasy games, the science fiction games MechWarrior and Rocketmen, as well as the quasi-historical Pirates of the Spanish Main.
Happy Birthday to MiniatureWargaming dot Com!
