Miniature scale, and why nobody will tell you what it is
28mm, 32mm, heroic, true scale. I went looking for an authority on what those mean and found hobby blogs quoting each other. That absence is the honest answer.
This was supposed to be the easy post. Explain 28mm, explain heroic scale, explain why a model from the nineties looks small next to its replacement, done before lunch.
Instead I spent an afternoon discovering that the hobby’s most-repeated numbers have almost nothing underneath them.
What I was looking for
A single authority saying what 28mm measures. Foot to eye or foot to head, because the difference is several millimetres and it changes every comparison anyone makes.
Games Workshop does not publish it, as far as I can find. No standards body publishes it. What exists is a large number of hobby blogs and vendor pages, all confident, most saying foot to eye, several quoting each other, none citing anything.
That is not a claim that the answer is unknowable. It is a claim about what a person can actually verify on an afternoon, which is what this blog is for.
The one thing I can source, and it is not a number
Heroic scale turns out to be a description of a style rather than a measurement: deliberately exaggerated proportions, with enlarged heads, hands, feet, weapons and facial features, dramatic poses and heavy detail, so that a figure reads clearly on a tabletop rather than being anatomically accurate.*
I have to flag what that citation is. It is a community-edited wiki, which is the weakest tier of source used anywhere on this blog, and I am using it because nothing better exists for the term. Read it as “this is what the hobby means by the word”, not as a manufacturer’s specification.
Even so, it reframes the question usefully. If “heroic” means the proportions are deliberately wrong, then arguing about whether a model is 28mm or 32mm is arguing about a measurement taken on a figure whose head is the wrong size on purpose.
What you can check yourself, without any of this
Put an old model next to a new one of the same thing. The difference is real, visible, and needs no authority to confirm, because you are holding both.
That is the part I would trust. The observation is checkable by anyone with two models and a flat surface. What is not checkable that way is the explanation: whether the change was a deliberate policy, a consequence of tooling, a drift in sculpting fashion, or all three. I found no Games Workshop statement on it, and every explanation I read was somebody’s inference.
Why I am publishing this anyway
Because “I could not source this” is more useful than a confident chart. If you are new and someone tells you Warhammer is 28mm scale, you now know three things: that the number is a convention rather than a specification, that the convention is probably measured to the eye rather than the top of the head, and that the word doing most of the work in the phrase is “heroic” rather than the millimetres.
If a real authority on this exists, I would like to read it. Until then this post is a description of a hole where a fact should be.
- *Heroic scale
Games Workshop Wiki (Fandom, community-edited)
Backs A community-wiki definition of heroic scale as a sculpting style rather than a measurement: exaggerated proportions with enlarged heads, hands, feet, weapons and facial features, dramatic poses, and intricate detail, chosen so a figure stands out on the tabletop rather than for anatomical accuracy. Fan-written, not a Games Workshop publication, and cited here because no authoritative source for the term was found.