Category: rules

It’s the year 2950 and we’re going to need a bigger army. And that bigger army is going to need some bigger tanks. The city of Damascus has been taken, after some vicious fighting, by our neighbor to the southeast, the Tillian Republic.  We know they mean to take...

The Hellfire Campaign is dead, long live the Hellfire 2.0 Campaign. For reasons too boring to go into here, I have put the Hyde’s Reach campaign to bed.  But the Jim Webster itch has not been fully scratched, so we turn our attention to “Hellfire and the Fall of...

In our last post, we covered the basic mechanics of Four Color Studio’s latest offering, 2d Delves.  Today, let’s talk about the campaign game. It’s what the kids these days call “procedurally generated” and “narrative”, meaning that you use random tables and just wave your hands and make up...

The title 2d Delves does not, it turns out, refer to the number of dimensions involved in the game.  That’s a good sign for a miniature wargame as those generally require the use of a third dimension.  Instead, the 2d relates to the dice involved.  Most of the melee and...

Alternative Armies’ En Garde includes not just one set of dueling rules, but three. Unlike the swordplay duel, which include everything from strength to reflexes to movement to endurance, the rules for the pistol duel are simple and streamlined.  The duel itself is comprised of four phases, the first...

It’s time. Your seconds stand in silent testimony. The trash talking has been silenced.  The dancing is over.  You and your 15mm opponent have finally reached the moment of the plunge into violence. In Alternative Armies’ En Garde, when the steel meets the flesh, the players have some important...

My recent travels have led me to conclude that my collection lacks a suitable shelf of one-on-one combat games.  If you think about it, these are a natural for the more mobile gamer who has to consider variables such as weight and portability.  If all you need is a...

The implementation of vector-based spaceship combat in Traveller is easy.  It’s the strategy that results from the process that’s hard.  Like chess, the rules are simple, but lead to a wealth of complex puzzles and potential pitfalls for the unwary. Marc Miller gives Traveller (1977) players two options: Just...

NOT 3D PRINT FILES! Sheesh. A Billion Suns has been on my shelf for far too long.  That’s Mike Hutchinson’s space shoot-em-up wargame built from the bottom up with an objective system that gives it more of an economics and shoot-n-scoot flavor than a line-em-up one.  It’s been languishing...

AD&D’s weapon versus AC adjustment table is the online recipe of tabletop RPGs.  Everybody that talks about it wants to talk around it. Or talk about their houserules. Or talk about people talking about it.  Or talk about how they calculated them better than Gary. Or sell you on...