It’s going to be a prepainted hobby

Mongoose just released pictures of some prepainted figures for their upcoming ultra-modern/near future skirmish game. In addition, em-4 is planning on releasing prepainted ACW figures. I firmly believe that within three years we will have prepainted figures for all the major periods: Modern, WWII, ACW, Medieval, and Ancients (well, Early Imperial Romans any way).

Wargamers have been dabbling in prepainteds for a while. Many people bought the Micro Machines Star Wars toys for their space fighter battles and the Hasbro Titanium line is allowing me to do that again for both Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. I also know many people who bought the common Star Wars Collectible Miniatures for their skirmish games. Even I picked up a lot of those figures (especially Stormtroopers and Rebel Troopers) to use in gaming; being older, however, I limited myself to miniatures from the original Trilogy. I finally decided that prepainteds were going to work when Heroscape came out with a set of Romans and you almost had enough different figures that a few packs could make a DBA army.

What effect this will have on the hobby remains to be seen. If the prepainted figure companies keep the scales the same as unpainted figures, then you are likely to have both types of players (the prepainter and the painter) playing games side by side. I can see scenarios where a painting miniatures moves toward something like what static display plastic modeling is today. A similar phenomenon exists in Model Railroading where you can buy ready made snap together track or you can stain your own ties and hand-lay your own rails with individual spikes.

Most likely, hand painted miniatures will be considered the ideal and people who like to paint still will; but, only because they like to paint not because they need to finish hundreds of figures to begin playing. We will have the best of both worlds when hand painted and prepainted army owners can play each other in their games.