RTS is more about clicking faster than your opponent while turn-based games are more about the strategy, about thinking and decision-making, at least that is what I think. Strategy-wise I enjoy turn-based games much more. I don’t like Real Time Strategy games very much, they are too confusing for my taste, everything happens at once, you’re constantly looking for your units which are always running around where they should not be, while you are suffering from supply problems and are forced to build and protect a base which is in turn attacked almost immediately by the enemy, while it is expected that you destroy the enemy’s base… very stressful. You see a battlefield, little soldiers, a toy box and all the stuff a kid needs to fight out great battles. The game takes place in a room where a table with a World War I diorama stands.

The introduction of the game did a great job in showing how the imagination of a child can make everything real so there’s the moment when the boy fades away holding the aircraft and there’s only the plane flying around then… check out the intro movie to see what I mean.But this review isn’t about Toy Commander, is it? No, it’s not – but that was the immediate reminiscence I had when I first played Toy Soldiers on the XBox 360. There was a complete house at your free disposal where these battles were fought while it was supposed that everything within the game was controlled by a young boy and his imagination. You can play with such figures, of course, in tabletop games – which could be called a “diorama in action”.īack in the good old days of the Sega Dreamcast console, there was a great game called Toy Commander which allowed the player to be a kid again, playing with little soldiers and toy vehicles, cars, tanks, fighter planes, helicopters. Usually a diorama is not intended for actually playing out the battle, it’s more like a picture taken in 3D showing a certain moment of the battle in question, a detailed study of uniforms and terrain, but not a wargame.

You have to buy the figures, paint them, arrange them, create terrain (even explosions!), you need some big table (or better an entire room) to show the beauty of it all and it’s simply not for everyone. I really like to look at dioramas and I love the dedication these guys put into their hobby – it’s a really time-consuming hobby and quite expensive. That’s sort of the adult version of the battles we all did as kids with toy soldiers in our room, where the magic of imagination changed the floor into something completely different… soldiers marching off to war, while we were the commander. I suppose every wargamer is aware of the existence of a certain subgenre within our hobby which is mainly about portraying battles with little tin or plastic soldiers in so-called dioramas.

Small soldiers game boy controls