March 20, 2025: Making My Own Legions Imperialis

My side hobby when I'm not writing games is painting miniatures. I have a tremendous number of Kruleboyz Orruks and Gloomspite Gitz (or, as I like to call them, Orcs & Goblins), but for the past year my obsession has firmly been in Legions Imperialis: Games Workshop's current iteration on the old Epic rules, set in the Horus Heresy. The size of an average human is ~6mm, and so you end up with some truly gargantuan armies.

I have no issue with the Legions Imperialis rules, but I find myself wanting more. I want a game I can play with friends who aren't familiar with wargames, that avoids the fiddly wound-tracking that is such a pain at this enormous scale, and I want it to be escalation-based instead of attrition-based. Normally in a wargame, each player lays out their whole army, and you whittle away at each other's forces over time. I want a game where you start with just a few troops on the board and slowly increase the scope of the combat until giant robots are punching each other while hordes of infantry get swept away.

There are some wargames that capture aspects of this (Chain of Command has a really interesting approach to escalation, and there are plenty of indie wargames that avoid fiddly math-details), but nothing that quite scratches that itch. So I guess I have no choice but to make it myself!