It is indeed that season once again, so if you are looking for gift inspiration, hearty recommendations, or just don’t know what to buy the miniature or gaming hobbyist in your life (including yourself; buy yourself something nice), Merry Matron Marcy is here to help with a selection of curated guides for all of your gift giving needs. I’ve assembled a team of elves (the Santa kind, not the Blood Bowl kind) to help me fill out these gift guides for your use!
Here at Goonhammer, we do occasionally receive products early to review on our site. For these gift guides, any authors speaking about items they have received promotionally will say so in their recommendation, but please keep in mind that these are not reviews: if we recommend something on this list, it is because we think you (or the special person in your life you are gifting this to!) will really appreciate it.
Historicals Games
While Games Workshop and Battletech titles get a lot of attention here at Goonhammer Dot Com, we have a very passionate collection of writers who love discussing historically accurate colors for jackets and games about the poor bloody infantry fighting hideous weirdos in a 3×3 space with period accurate weapons. Our gift guide is broken into three categories: Budget, Investment, and Extravagant.
Our Budget suggestions are great for Secret Santas, beginners curious about the games, or people just looking to get something meaningful without breaking the bank. Investment gifts are for those willing to spend a little more time and money on a gift, ranging from larger things like big model kits, terrains, or accessories, and Extravagant gifts are for those who find money and time are no obstacle to providing the very best in gifting experience, and with the freer range of Historical games, you can really get pretty wild here! Go ahead, buy that Authentic Napoleonic Costume for your next event!
Budget Gifts
Inquisitor Moloko: How about starting a new skirmish game with a friend or two for less than the cost of a Rhino?! Grab yourself a Force of Virtue pdf rulebook $8, combine it with a box of Perry plastic mercenaries and free downloadable starter forces and you’ll be well on your way! You may want to consider adding a spare command sprue for each player, just to make sure everyone has enough options, but that won’t break the bank at a mere £3.75 each. For more about Force of Virtue, see our introduction to the game here .
Momma Negan: The easiest gift you can give your loved one or friends for their historical hobby needs is an Osprey Men-at-Arms book about a faction or army they paint. It comes with plenty of photos of equipment, artwork of soldiers in their uniforms in full color and plenty more information. All of this will give them plenty of inspiration and potentially a helping hand in choosing the color for their models.
While you can get these books from Osprey directly, be sure to check your local hobby shops, they might just have the book in stock.
VH Eric: A historical weirdo. We talked about these some in the metal miniatures roundtable – there’s a lot of neat, characterful miniatures out there that are good one-off purchases. The Militant Tendency or The Witchfinder General from Bloody Miniatures to lure your favorite Pike and Shotte Wargamer into Devilry Afoot (in this case, admittedly four weirdos). A Silver Bayonet figure from North Star. A single officer, radio carrier or the like can make a great vignette for a Jump-off-point in Chain of Command. Price: Under £10
Lenoon: If you’ve got a lot of models for literally any age or system, but you want to pick up something new for cheap, a good Budget gift is any Too Fat Lardies game you haven’t played yet. Got Romans? Get Infamy Infamy. Got WW2? Get chain of command, and if you’ve got that get I Ain’t Been Shot Mum. If there’s a period you fancy playing, there’s a Too Fat Lardies game for it and it’ll be bloody fun. They’re usually around £15-17 for a PDF, with options to fill your boots with tokens, rulebooks, expansions and campaign guides. But start off with anything. I doubt you’ll find it a disappointment!
If you’re looking for a good budget gift for someone in your life who plays SAGA, why not get them some nicer tokens for fatigue? I picked up a small handful of Viking coin replicas from the Viking Dragon for my SAGA forces, and they look a lot nicer than cardboard or MDF tokens. You can get replica coins from many periods and areas for as little as 25p a coin, so have a look and spice up someone’s table with a period-appropriate set of counters.
Bair: Carrying on with Lenoon’s comment above about “any Too Fat Lardie’s game” for a nice budget option I want to speak very specifically about Midgard. It’s new, it’s shiny, and it’s a super easy all-rounder type game to get as a gift. Not 100% sure what kind of minis they collect? That’s fine! So long as it’s any time period before black powder/guns really got involved then you’re golden. It’s an incredible minis-agnostic game that works for historicals games from Ancient time periods up through to the Crusades and a bit beyond; it also works really well for fantasy gaming, too. Get it for them, it rules.
Ilor: Historical wargames can often be a tough sell for your gaming group, as sometimes getting your friends interested in a particular period or rule system is like pushing a rope. Your friend or loved-one might find themselves in this situation. In cases where they can’t get others on board, there are a number of games that support solo play pretty well (see above under “Too Fat Lardies games”). But what about that Holy Grail of historical wargaming: campaign play? Well fear not, William Silvestor’s Solo Wargaming Guide is packed full of useful ideas, suggestions, tidbits, and randomization tools to give you a challenge even when your only opponent is yourself! Not a game itself, it’s designed to be used with whatever other system you use for whatever period you favor, and the concepts are flexible enough to be applied to loads of different games/eras. And at just under $15, it’s a great value.
Michael O “mugginns”: I like the idea of historical weirdos and freaks, so let’s check out the Bad Squiddo line, a super awesome line of miniatures. These Frenzied Ghouls are amazing. They have a whole line of ghouls that can get you started in a horror game like The Silver Bayonet or Devilry Afoot. I also picked up the Ghoul Matriarch for myself for the holidays as a big bad.
No weirdos collection would be complete without the Turkey Man – BSQ’s famous super weirdo turkey guy who is cakemaxxing. Nadja the Bat Vampire also makes a great end of campaign villain as well.
Investment Gifts
VH Eric: The whole Summer of SAGA series should betray that we really like SAGA. A solid investment gift is the appropriate book and dice for SAGA, and if you really want to go ham, an accompanying bag of models from Victrix (https://www.victrixlimited.com/goonhammer Disclosure: Affiliate Link). We’ve got several articles on how to do exactly this (https://www.goonhammer.com/goonhammer-historicals-victrix-rus-miniatures-review-and-pagan-rus-saga-warband/ and https://www.goonhammer.com/starting-saga-building-a-one-kit-anglo-saxon-warband/ ). Price: £40 for the bag of miniatures, £50 for the SAGA rules and accompanying supplement, £14 for the appropriate dice.
Lenoon: I think a good gift at this kind of level – for yourself or for anyone else – is a game in a box. Picking up something that’s self contained, satisfying and damn fun to play and paint all in one box isn’t that common with Historicals, but there are some really good examples. Warlord’s Black Seas has the Master and Commander starter set – three frigates, a load of brigs, all the dice, sails, mat, tokens and historical background you need, and you’re off and going almost immediately after opening the box. I gave it a bloody glowing review, It’s a steal at £59, and while my year of the ship got hijacked by playing and painting loads of SAGA, I’m still cracking out the original box for fun, fast games where I can live my best Jack Aubrey fantasy.
If you’ve got a lot of Napoleonics (at any scale), and you’re thinking of a medium sized gift for yourself that isn’t even more French Line Infantry, have a think about picking up Soldiers of Napoleon, especially if you’ve been playing a lot of Black Powder and want to move on to something a little…. Stronger. The rulebook and cards set is £30 and will let you get playing right away, and if you’d like to tailor your playing to your particular collection, there are expansion books for different fronts and eras for an additional £25. It’s a great game and one that I don’t play enough, and will absolutely take your Napoleonic gaming to the next level.
Serotonin: Got a Bolt Action or other WW2 gaming fan in your life? Or how about someone who’s watched the great Escape one too many times? Play a game of daring night time raids on German bases by a crack team of commandos. Have a look at 02 Hundred Hours from Grey For Now, a complete game in a box can be had for £48, including a rule book, tokens, character and event cards and best of all 36 multi part plastic 28mm miniatures, depicting sneaky SAS commando types, lazy cigarette smoking sentries and determined dog handler teams. A very clever and simple game that plays as well solo as it does with an opponent. Now where did I put that det pack?
Bair: Something a little different: small scale WWII models. This Victrix Starter Set gives you nearly 100 each of British and German infantry plus four each of Sherman and Panzer tanks. With all of those they can go on to play with a number of different rules sets. Lots of ways to base these up so I recommend keeping that out of the gift and allowing them to choose what they want to do with it.
Price: £50 (with a saving of over £20!)
Michael O “mugginns”: A good present would be getting them what they need to get started in something like The Silver Bayonet or Devilry Afoot. Both rulebooks are relatively affordable: Silver Bayonet can be had for $20-25, and Devilry Afoot is available on Wargame Vault for around $10. Then you’ll want some unit boxes – for Silver Bayonet I would advise British Unit One or French Unit One from North Star Military Figures (or Badger Games in the USA). For Devilry Afoot I’d recommend Crucible Crush in the USA / Canada and Bloody Miniatures in the UK.
You could also get a buddy started in SAGA, which is a classic case of getting something for someone but also for yourself, because now you’ll have a village to raid and pillage. You’ll want to grab the Age of Vikings and SAGA rulebooks (that will run you around 44 pounds total).
Along with that you’ll want to grab a bag of Victrix Late Saxons. It’s entirely possible to create a SAGA warband from just one bag, as detailed by the team here. Victrix is currently running a 20% off sale, so there is no better time than now to grab a bag! You can use our affiliate link here. You’ll also want to grab the Anglo Saxon dice (they’re the green ones) that run about 14 pounds. With that and some D6s, your partner is now set to throw down in some sweet SAGA Age of Vikings games with you.
Ilor: I’ll continue on my paired themes of books and campaigns and recommend Henry Hyde’s Wargaming Campaigns. This is a much deeper dive into structuring a campaign, with loads of details that will inspire your wargamer with ways to link their individual games together into a more cohesive and satisfying series. This book has tons of ideas on weather, logistics, fog of war, lines of communication, and more. It’s jam packed, and is a book I keep coming back to over and over
Extravagant Gifts
VH Eric: Empress Miniatures has a 28mm resin and metal U-Boat (https://www.empressminiatures.com/u-boat-338-p.asp). It’s 73 cm long. Buy this for the British Commando player in your life, so they can pretend to blow it up over and over. Price: £69
Alternatively, what brings historical tables to life is terrain. And lots of it. On the extravagant end of the gifting spectrum is a 3d printer. Any one in the Bambu Labs range (https://bambulab.com/en-us) would do fine – personally I have an A1 Mini and a P1S, and they are both absolute terrain workhorses. Price: Between $199 and $1200, depending on model.
Lenoon: Want to go big into historicals, but not into the painting and making? Like you want to spend the money to basically start playing the entire Battle of Waterloo on Boxing Day with a couple of thousand guys on each side? Wofun has you covered. High quality, absolutely gorgeous standees in a variety of scales, robust enough for significant play and ready to go right out of the box. You can pick up sensible amounts if you really want – we reviewed them very positively – but if you’re feeling truly extravagant, pick up the entire Battle of Waterloo at 10mm for a steal at £350. That’s 6,700 miniatures and you’ll have them all based before the end of the holidays. Just go do it, and when you do, send pictures so I can live the dream through you.
I wondered whether this was extravagant enough, so let me present to you the biggest thing I can possibly think of: an entire French town in 28mm. Napoleonics battles are often fought over fields and hedges and things, but imagine fighting the last defense of Paris, the guns of the Young Guard glowing white-hot on the Quai de Valmy, Russians and Austrians pouring along the boulevards, the Marshals scheming to depose the Emperor. You want to play it, I know. We all do. To pull off the board, head to Sarissa. You’ll need pretty much everything from the Old Europe and Dutch/Belgian ranges, often in multiples. Select bits of the World War Europe range will round it out with trenches,, canal sections and early 19th century buildings. When I costed it up, the dream urban Napoleonics board rolls in around £600. Marcy said extravagant – so here it is.
Greg: Stop being a coward and buy way too many 6mm Frenchmen from Baccus. You might think that these little bargain priced guys aren’t that much of a splurge but that’s because you’re thinking small in the wrong way. The right way to think small is that because the models are smaller you can make them bigger. Go scoop up 600 or so infantry for like a hundred bucks, you will never regret this.
Bair: Like the look of the above Victrix 12mm models but it’s not quite enough? Let’s expand that out even further and look at a couple of the army bundles. Pick up either the British or American bundle (to taste) and then the German bundle. These come in at 12mm scale and work well with 10mm terrain that you can pick up from Pendraken for buildings from the Eastern front, some hedges, and some random bits like craters would do well. If you want to add even further on top then get them the Battlegroup rules set to use all these minis with. All of this together will give a table full of terrain, models, and the rules to use them all together. A beautifully self-contained project!
Price for the two army bundles: just under £190
Price with terrain and rules: £300-400+ depending how much terrain you want to add!
Cronch: We all know that historicals is basically just one step away from being a train person, and what do you need for a train layout (or a cool historicals board)? A ton of hand made foam terrain. And what would help you make that? An amazing hot wire cutter, that’s what. Proxxon are spendy, but make the most well-regarded hot wire cutters on the market, and it’s a real investment in your darling friend or partner’s capacity to fill their/your living space with foam offcuts and beautiful rolling hills sculpted by their own hand.
Ilor: Who doesn’t love pirates? No one with any sense, that’s who. So why not give your pirate-loving friend or family member the gift of scallawaggery with the 2-player starter set for Firelock Games’ excellent Blood & Plunder game? With a bunch of figures and two ships (!!!), it has enough to get you raiding the Spanish Main in no time! And if they’re already into Blood & Plunder and you want to get really extravagant, might I suggest a really big ship like the 6th Rate Frigate ($240) or the massive Spanish Galleon ($425)? These ships are awe-inspiring on the tabletop.
This article is part of a larger series of our 2024 Gift Guides! For more guides, click this link. Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.