One of my hobbies is wargaming, which, basically put, is playing with soldiers. However, it is not playing with green army men, generally speaking. There are many, many sets of plastic, lead and metal soldiers which are built with wargaming and diorama-building in mind. Not only are they much better built than green army men, they are intended to be very historically accurate and the hobby covers a wide range of periods such as ancient, medieval, Napoleonic and modern. I prefer to buy plastic figures 2 cm tall (1:72 scale) because they are very cheap ($12AU for 40-odd infantrymen is a good rule of thumb) but I do have to paint them myself.
There are hundreds of kits, from Romans, to Greeks, to Knights, to WWI soldiers to Medieval Korean soldiers. The very biggest and best companies are HaT, Zvezda and Italeri but Emhar, Strelets and Caesar make good sets too. Once you buy your soldiers and paint them, you can either make a diorama (a famous history scene such as a Viking raid built on a small board, kinda like a 3D photograph) or play a wargame with them.
A wargame is a game that uses model soldiers to either re-enact a historical battle or to play a battle that could have happened. There are also Fantasy figures (such as for The Lord Of The Rings) and rulesets, but I haven’t done much investigating in that area (yet). In a normal wargame the soldiers are limited by how much they can move in a turn and usually if a combat with enemy soldiers ensures because of these moves, a dice decides how many on each side die and are taken off the battlefield. The dice are weighted by several factors, such as how skilled the soldiers are and how well-armored they are (a highly skilled soldier is more likely to kill a enemy soldier and a well-armored soldier is less likely to be killed, because his armor protects him). Many rules also focus on morale, how brave the soldiers are and the possibility of them running away from a fight. Who wins a combat, whether or not the soldiers run away and so forth is decide by dice, but the dice are weighted by different factors.
My wargame rules I take off the internet, and there are several good sites with good rulesets on them. One of them is by an American who sometimes teaches history at a school by using his model soldiers to re-enact a battle with simple rules. So if the kids are learning about the American Civil War at school, he comes to the school and re-enacts a part of the battle of
This is quite a long post, so I think I’ll leave it at that. If you take a look at either of these sites, please leave a comment telling me what you thought.