Twenty Quid, One Warband: A Skirmish Force Built Entirely From British High Street Bargains

The Rules of the Challenge

Here is the deal. You have twenty pounds. You need a warband for a skirmish game, which in practice means somewhere between four and eight models on round bases that look like they belong to the same force. Everything, including paints and tools, has to come out of that twenty. Secondhand is allowed. Pound shops are encouraged. Nothing from a dedicated hobby retailer unless it lands on a charity stall first.

It sounds tight, and it is, but it is also a genuinely useful exercise. Skirmish gaming is the single best value corner of the hobby, and a small force with a coherent colour scheme will always look better than a large one painted badly. Twenty pounds is enough if you spend it deliberately.

Finding the Figures

Start with the places nobody in this hobby thinks to look.

Charity shops and car boot sales occasionally turn up whole boxes of plastic soldiers, board game spares and the odd partwork magazine with a free figure on the cover. Discount retailers and the bigger value chains sell cheap plastic figure sets in their toy aisles, often for a couple of quid, and buried in those bags are usually three or four sculpts that work perfectly well at skirmish scale once they are based properly. Pound shops are where you find the odd bag of eight skeleton or soldier figures that nobody expects to see on a painted table.

Then there is the secondhand route, which is where real savings live. Job lots on auction sites are the classic: search for "unpainted plastic miniatures lot" or "old wargames figures" and sort by ending soonest. A tenner often buys you a scuffed shoebox containing twenty figures, of which six will be worth painting and fourteen will be swapped with a friend. Trade the fourteen. That is how a warband gets built.

Finally, look at what you already own. Almost every hobbyist in Britain has a sprue of something sitting in a box, half assembled, unloved. That is not cheating, that is efficiency.

The Budget, Written Down

Item	Spend
Six secondhand or bargain-bin figures	£7.00
Grey spray primer (discount hardware shop)	£3.00
Three cheap acrylic craft paints plus black and white	£5.00
Two synthetic brushes (one flat, one size 0)	£3.00
Bases, sand and PVA	£2.00
Total	£20.00

That leaves nothing for a wash, which is the one genuine compromise. A drop of black paint thinned heavily with water is not as good as a proper shade, but it gets you eighty per cent of the way there. If you can find a cheap brown ink or a tester pot in a décor shop, so much the better.

Paints That Cost Less Than a Sandwich

Craft acrylics are thicker and less pigmented than hobby paints, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not used them. That is fine. You are not painting a competition entry, you are painting a warband.

The trick is to buy fewer colours and mix more. A mid-brown, a dark blue or green, an off-white and a black will cover skin, cloth, metal and leather between them. Yellow and red cheap paints are usually weak and chalky, so avoid them unless you are prepared to layer four coats. Buy a mid-grey instead and mix it into everything to keep the force looking tied together.

Thin everything. Cheap paint needs more water than you expect, and two thin coats will always beat one thick one. If your budget stretches to it, pick up a small bottle of matte medium from an art shop and use it to stop the craft paint drying chalky on the palette.

The Five-Evening Painting Plan

Evening one: build and clean up. Scrape mould lines, fill gaps with a smear of PVA and superglue, glue to bases and leave overnight. Add sand or texture paste to the bases now, not later.

Evening two: prime and block in. A light grey spray from about twenty centimetres, in short bursts, on a dry day. Grey is the smart choice for a budget force because it is a mid-tone: your shadows read darker, your highlights read lighter, and you need fewer layers to get there. Block in the main colours only, ignoring every detail. Cloth, skin, metal, boots.

Evening three: shade. Thin black paint to the consistency of milk and run it into the recesses, or brush it all over the cloth and metal and accept that it will look awful for ten minutes. Then do the same, warmer and thinner, over the skin. Let it dry fully.

Evening four: bring it back up. Reload the base colours and paint everywhere the wash has not settled, leaving the darker tone in the crevices. Then mix a little off-white into each colour and pick out the high points on shoulders, knees and helmets. Two tones per model is enough for a table-ready look.

Evening five: bases and finishing. Drybrush the sand with a pale grey or sand colour, paint the base rim black, and add a tuft or two if you have them. A neat black rim does more for a cheap model than any amount of freehand.

Keep the palette identical across all six figures. This is the whole secret. Six mismatched bargain-bin sculpts painted in the same three colours with the same base treatment will read as a single force from arm's length, and arm's length is where skirmish games happen.

Making Cheap Look Deliberate

A few small things lift a budget warband out of the toy box. Cut the moulded base tabs off and put the figures on proper bases with a bit of height. Give every model a matching colour somewhere, even if it is only a shoulder pad or a sash. Keep the metal areas to one or two per figure and paint them last, with a bright silver highlight over a dark base. And resist the urge to add a sixth colour because you got bored, because that is what makes a force look like it came from three different boxes.

Get Them On a Table

A finished warband with nobody to play is just a nice shelf. Skirmish rulesets are widely available free, most clubs will happily run a demo game, and a twenty-pound force is a perfectly legitimate reason to walk into your local shop on a club night and ask for a game. Six figures, one evening a week, and a fiver left in your pocket for a cup of tea. Grey matter, as ever, is what you make of it.