Miniature Scales - A quick, not intended to be all inclusive, guide.

It's tricky when you play, or collect, one brand of miniatures, & then you see a whole bunch on eBay that you have never heard of. Are they the same size? Are they compatible with my collection or army?
It's even trickier when different manufacturers use different references to scale - unless you hold that mini in your hand, you have no chance!
So hopefully this guide will help you out.

Note - this guide only refers to "fantastic" type minis (SF & Fantasy), & includes very few references to historicals. These are much more standardized, & most historical minis that refer to the same scale are compatible.

Generally miniatures are referred to as XXmm or exaggerated XXmm.
In our eBay Shop Red Branch we sell minis by quite a number of manufacturers, & I will list them below to give you an idea of their relative sizes.
Important note - the XXmm size is roughly equivalent to the height of a standard human & IS NOT the height of a particular miniature. Given uniforms, poses etc, this would be an impossible system.

Games Workshop (Warhammer Fantasy Battles & Warhammer 40,000) - They call their scale Exaggerated 28mm - I call it 30mm
Excalibur Miniaturen (Fearless & fantasy ranges) - These minis are 30mm
Dark Age - around the 30mm scale
Hasslefree - around the 30mm scale - slightly smaller
Freebooter - Slightly larger around 32mm scale
Confrontation - Slightly larger again - around 35mm
All the 30mm scales will work together quite nicely.

Once you get into the 32mm & 35mm though, you can run into troubles.
If you are playing a skirmish game without tight coherencies, you're OK
If you are running a unit game though, you can really only use the larger minis for characters & heroes, or if the entire unit is made from miniatures from the one game.

You can play with scales to give your armies a much cooler look - heroes look truly heroic if they are bigger &  or chunkier.

Another consideration, apart from just the size of the mini, is the way each company chooses to portray particular races. For example Hasslefree Dwarfs are somewhat taller & lankier than GW dwarfs, whilst Confrontation dwarfs are really nuggety little fellas!

Coming in the next few days, I will add pics to this guide to give you a better idea of how these different miniature brands stack up.

Mike