Using AA miniature models for AA 1940 global

Many of the the A&A “miniatures” are much too big for the A&A board games.  You’d need to print the Global map at a huge scale to make all the “minis” fit.  See here for more discussion of this topic: http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=40749.0

I’m at the office right now, so I don’t have any sculpts or minis that I can measure, but my impression is that simply blowing up the Global map by a factor of 1.5 would not be enough.  Here’s what I based my estimate on.  According to the Wikipedia article on A&A Miniatures, the vehicle minis are scaled 1/120 in theory (and between 1/150 and 1/100 in practice).  A real-life Sherman tank had a length of about 6 meters, or 6,000mm.  6,000mm divided by 120 = 50mm. The A&A board game Sherman is small enough to fit on a dime; looking at a ruler, I’d estimate it’s about 15mm long.  If the A&A Miniatures Sherman really is 50mm long, that makes it 3.3 times bigger than the board game version.

And incidentally, here’s another potential problem regardless of the size of the A&A Minis.  If I understand your posts correctly, you don’t own any A&A Minis.  And the problem is that the A&A Minis have been discontinued.  They’re no longer for sale on the primary market, which means that your ownly option for buying them would be as second-hand items.  They could be hard to find and they could be expensive.

Yea, a couple years ago I tried to make them work too.  They are just too big and the ships are even worse.  I would suggest getting minis from HBG (Historical Board Gaming)  They have a huge variety of pieces. Don’t forget to check the Amerika set and its 3 expansions.  Really cool minis in those sets.

Something else that would be useful for you to buy – and which will be very low-priced compared to the minis you’ve bought – is a set of full-sized plastic poker chips in different colours.  In the A&A board games, multiple units of the same type are indicated by putting mini-sized poker chips under the sculpts; this is a trick that saves on space and that makes up for the fact that players have a limited supply of sculpts.  The same trick will serve the same purposes in your scaled-up version of Global 1940…but because you’ll be working with large models, you’ll need large poker chips.

Incidentally, if the A&A Minis turn out to be too large for a practical tabletop map, and you’re still determined to use the minis, then you may need to take your basic concept to the next level: make your map even larger, print it out in sections, and lay it out on the floor of a suitably large room.  If possible, cover the map with large sheets of transparent acrylic to protect it from scratches, then put the minis on top of the acrylic.  This would be similar in concept to Fletcher Pratt’s Naval Wargame, which was briefly popular in the 1930s: it was played with scale model ships (carved out of balsa wood) on the floor of rented ballrooms.  Players were required to play in their socks, to reduce the risk of crushing the ships.

Here’s a comparative picture I took of five A&A minis and their A&A boardgame counterparts: three tanks (Sherman, Panther, Tiger) and two battleships (Bismarck, Yamato).