An area of particular interest to me is people who have an interest in miniatures gaming and might well be interested, but who are discouraged for this or that reason. So I wanted to talk a bit about some of those discussions and what my take is, possibly in a series of posts.

Please note that this has nothing to do with persuading people who are not interested at all, it is aimed at an audience who are or might well be interested, but who are concerned about a specific issue. 

It is also not applicable to every possible situation in the universe, so let's be reasonable.

Lastly it is intended to address common arguments I see made, in the interest of accuracy. 

Anyways, the most common objection I see is that miniatures gaming is too expensive / an expensive hobby.

This I cannot agree with for the simple reason that I began miniatures gaming when I had almost no disposable income and did much of my most energetic gaming during periods where my income for miniatures was extremely limited.

When I lived in Portland, we played a ton of miniatures gaming, particularly Nuts, Crossfire and Stargrunt 2. In all three cases I supplied the miniatures for both sides. 

Here is what armies for all three games cost me (using todays prices, not 15 years ago): 

Stargrunt 2: We played in 15mm. The figures in question were a mish mash of stuff but several squads from GZG were used. 

For a platoon sized game, you need 3 squads for each side and the GZG 15mm figures come in packs of 8. Looking at their website right now, it looks like 3.6 pounds per pack of 8 so that is 28.8 pounds for two armies. You will probably want to grab an extra pack for each so you might have a mortar team or a few officers, so let's call it an even 36 pounds. 

Crossfire: Again played in 15mm. I based mine with 3 figures to a base. I ended up buying two of the Battlefront platoon packs since that was more than plenty figures to fill out two battalions for Crossfire. 

Looking online, it looks like prices are all over the place but 20 dollars for a platoon seems average. We will want a few extra bits like some machine gun teams and my choice at the time was to fill in extra stuff with Peter Pig minis, which are 6.75 per pack of 8 from Brookhurst hobbies in the US. If we say 2 platoon packs and 4 extra packs of Peter Pig, we come in at around 65 dollars.

Nuts: This is even easier because we played with 1/72 scale plastics (though if you built the armies above, odds are you would have enough left over to mount up a squad or two for skirmishing).

A box of 1/72 scale plastic figures will cost between 10 and 15 dollars at the good folks over at Michigan Toy Soldier Company, so for both sides (and with more figures than you would ever know what to do with) you are probably below 30 dollars.

Conclusion:

Now this is omitting terrain since I am assuming if you are highly price sensitive, you are going with paper and felt or DIY'ing from scraps, but if you want throw in another 100 dollars on top of this to get a fun table setup with some stuff. 

That puts you at somewhere around 30 dollars on the cheapest to below 200 dollars at the high end to get started. As noted this is for fielding TWO armies so it is a complete play set. If you are doing this with a friend, halve the expense and then spend the rest on buying yourself a starter paint set.

Is that expensive? Well, that depends on the person but I think we can agree that this is hardly insurmountable.

(and this is omitting that you can play miniatures games with paper minis, on a virtual tabletop or any number of other solutions, but I am focusing here on what people usually mean when they say miniatures game). 

But but but:

When I have had this discussion in the past the objection usually comes as some sort of "but I want to play Warhammer 40.000".

Sure. If the only game you want to play is an expensive game, then it is an expensive start. But then the discussion should be "is Warhammer 40.000 expensive?", not "is Miniatures gaming expensive?". 

Your turn:

Is miniatures gaming expensive? What does your other hobbies cost? Sound off in the comments if you like.