“The Christmas Morning” test is a means of analyzing how normie-friendly a miniature wargame is. The supposition is that most people want an experience where the game Santa leaves under the tree can be unwrapped, slapped on the kitchen table, and played that morning. It’s a good and useful heuristic built on a flawed first assumption: miniature wargames could be normslop, if only they tried a little harder.
This first principle is a much cherished canard fully embraced by those trying to make a buck on the industry side of the hobby. By their nature, the commercial side of the hobby wants to maximize revenue, and that means throwing out as wide a net as possible. The commentariat also fully embraces the notion that quantity of hobbyists is the supreme goal – even at the expense of burning the village down to make it more welcoming – which is the natural result of being so firmly wedded, and in some cases financially so, to the commercial side of the hobby. It’s the same parallel that we see in every other aspect of human endeavor. It’s the same process we watched turn TTRPGs into whatever this nonsense is:
Miniature wargames are not, in fact, for everyone, and efforts to make them more so threaten to undermine the very things that make the hobby what it is. This is a hobby that is built upon a low-time-preference mindset. Everything in the hobby forces the enthusiast to slow down and savor the moment rather than go go go explosions now gotta make it more biggerer and awesomer. You have to be willing to spend money, time, attention, and effort if you want to get the best out of the hobby, and that’s not even mentioning the social investments necessary to find or build up a stable of reliable opponents and allies whose tastes match your own. It’s a hard hobby to get into, and that difficulty has preserved it for decades.
But that’s changing due to some heavy externalities that don’t get discussed much. You can see it in the shift from massive, multi-hour rank-and-flank toward compact, “narrative-driven, but not too narrative” skirmish games. That evolution isn’t just about changing design tastes – it’s a direct downstream effect of things like inflation, cost-of-living increases, and stagnant wages in the hobby’s primary markets like the US and UK impact. As these regions become flooded with hungry welfare-class foreigners, the costs of supporting an ever increasing parasite class falls heavier and heavier on the middle-class foundation of the hobby. The modern housing crunch means smaller apartments, shared living spaces, and disappearing basements, which wargamers respond to by favoring portable 3×3 foot boards over massive 6×4 tables. As middle-class wage earners work more hours to pay the rising tax burden caused by rampant fraud in the public sector, they experience “time poverty” and a worsening work-life balance that itself makes quick 45-minute skirmishes more practical than marathon tournament games.
We’re pushing toy soldiers around here. It’s a hobby. A great one, really one of the best. But it IS a luxury. It’s just one that appeals most to the brighter than average, but not particularly career-driven college men and the more intelligent sort of high school and college men.
It’s exactly the market being pressed so hard on all sides by an elite class seeking to replace them with a population more malleable and servile. There are worse effects than muh tabletop games, but make no mistake – the elite-poverty polarization that has been the direct policy goal of the anglo-sphere governments for the last few decades doesn’t just destroy high-trust society’s, it trashes the common greens. The common greens aren’t just clean rivers and lakes, mind you. The concept includes third spaces like community pools, movie theaters, public transit, and grassroots infrastructure like local game stores, club spaces, and long-term creative projects.
It’s a very strange thing that so many miniature wargamers embrace the political movements whose policies are such a threat to the hobby. You’d think a hobby in which long-term thinking and the ability to spot threats at a distance would breed a smarter response to pressures that work against it, and yet perhaps it’s those very traits that lead the ugly deformed freaks of the communist class to work so hard to subvert and ruin the hobby.
To be fair, some do. The chattering, nattering right-leaning game pundits make their bones hyperventilating about bug chasers foisting narrative changes and sex-change operations for space troopers. And yet, they never quite get around to pointing out the multitude of ways communist policies hurt the hobby as a second or third order effect. I guess that sort of in-depth analysis doesn’t get the same clicks as crying about the outrage-du-jour. But those sorts of objections are all about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of western civilization.
It’s a lot harder to present the “Christmas morning test” as a shallow and false expectation that the hobby should be a mass-market one filled with instant, frictionless dopamine hits. Pointing at the symptoms of Clown World is a lot harder than arguing that miniature wargaming, by its very nature, demands patience, long-term craft, historical consciousness, and deep engagement. Rejecting the Christmas morning test means rejecting the disposable, low-effort consumer culture that mirrors the broader spiritual and economic erosion of the West.
Maybe they don’t see what the parasites on the hobby see. Miniature wargaming—particularly historical wargaming and traditional tactical strategy—is more than just a pastime. It’s a custodian of Western memory, tactical heritage, and deep intellectual engagement. These are the reasons that the ugly, deformed freaks are so dead set on transitioning and sterilizing the hobby as if it was a small child. They understand with the low cunning of a predator that the hollowing out of the middle class, the loss of physical space, and the attacks on traditional community infrastructure aren’t just bad for the price of plastic miniatures; they are part of a broader civilizational devolution.
Fighting to preserve the wargaming hobby – protecting local clubs, rejecting sterile corporate conveniences, and holding onto physical craftsmanship – is a micro-battle in the larger fight to preserve the soul, culture, and self-reliance of Western civilization itself. And for whatever you do to preserve that flame, I am grateful. And know that you’ll always have a place at my table.