Reduced Scale
One Hour Wargames

OHW SCALE MODIFICATIONS

Basing

My figures are based for De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA). This gives a base width of 60mm with various depths depending on troop type. I use DBA basing so I can also use my figures with DBA and Hordes of the Things (HOTT) rules as well as OHW.

Game Scale

I use a single 60mm wide base as my basic OHW unit.

Since 60mm = 2.4” this means that a single base is not wide enough for an OHW unit which needs to be somewhere in the range of 4” - 6”. So I have decreased the OHW game scale by adopting a half scale for all OHW measurements:

1 inch in OHW = 0.5 inches in my game scale.

I have made a ruler marked up at 3” (= 6” OHW), 4.5” (= 9” OHW) and 6” (= 12” OHW) to assist with this new scale.

My 60mm wide bases are now equivalent to a 4.8” wide unit in a standard OHW game, so this works.

Tabletop

The standard OHW tabletop is 36” x 36”. At the new scale reduces to 18” x 18” or 457mm x 457mm.

For my tabletop I use a 900mm x 600mm cork pin board which has been painted green. A cork board is self-supporting, light and easy to store away and retrieve (mine lives behind a wardrobe).

As you can see from the picture below, I've designated a square play area for OHW on the cork board, with ample space for my dice tower and other gaming accessories just off the play area. .

The actual playing area on the cork board measures 550mm x 550mm: so a little bit bigger than the theoretical required size. Since I can fit 9 bases across the width of this tabletop - which is the same number of 4” bases that would fit across a 36” x 36” tabletop in the original rules - I don’t feel I have compromised the game too much.