The Complete One Hour Wargame

What with one thing and another, it occurred to me that you've never seen the medieval Big Box in all its compact wargame glory.  

One complete wargame

 As you can see, the Big Box contains the following:

• A three foot by three foot ground covering cloth
• One large forest and one small forest
• A farmstead with associated walled field
• A large hill and a small hill
• One small pond
• One rocky base representing rough ground
• Sixty inches of roadway not including the crossroads
• Sixty-eight inches of river including two fords and one bridge
• Two complete 10 stand armies in the 6-mm scale

That's everything you need to make any one of the 30 battlefields shown in the scenario chapter of the One Hour Wargame rulebook.  You could easily use this setup for just about any of the rule sets included in the book, too.  Granted, you may want to swap out the farmstead for something more technologically or geographically appropriate (i.e. a clapboard church for the American Civil War or a petrol station for WWII), but that should be easy enough to do while building another matched set of armies.

When the battle is done, the whole setup fits into a box small enough to fit into the overhead carry-on compartment of your standard passenger aircraft.

All packed away for the night.

It might not be as glorious as some of the Infinity setups you see floating around on the net or have as many figures as a Featherstone participation game, but it's enough to scratch the wargaming itch, and you don't need a lot of scratch or space to put the whole box together.  As usual, the figures are the expensive part, and if you go with an outfit like Irregular Miniatures you can get each army for somewhere around sixty bucks.  That means this whole game costs less than half of an army for many of the Big Box game companies.