Chainmail Quick Reference Sheet
If ever there was a wargame that cried out for a quick reference sheet, Chainmail is it. Find yourself a girl that looks at you like Gary Gygax looked at unique subsystems, fren.
And yet, after literal minutes of searching, I couldn’t find hide nor hair of a QRS for this classic game. That’s a surprise, given how much interest this game has seen over the years. I suppose this game suffers from the same curse as the curse of D&D analysis, which is to say that there are a lot more people talking about and theorizing about the game than are actually playing it.
[Editor’s note: Link updated 18 March 2022]
As a guy who spends more time playing the game, and a guy still early enough in his Chainmail career to have a good grasp of what the beginners need to know, I threw together this handy-dandy two-pager to help those who follow in my footsteps. You’ll still need to root through the book for things like weather, artillery fire, and prisoner rules, but at least now you’ve got the core stuff in one place.
This QRS includes the most commonly used tables in the game, with a few odd reminders for the squirrely rules that are easy to forget in the heat of tabletop battle. The game has an undeserved reputation for byzantine systems, due largely to having been written in High Gygaxian. The man was brilliant, but his brain walked down strange and winding paths. My sheet inverts a few of his mathematical functions, and thanks to the magic of the Associative Principle of Addition, spits out the same results with less effort. At least, less effort for those whose brains walk down the same strange and winding paths as my own.
Enjoy, and Merry Christmas, ya big lugs!