BrikWars! is a site dedicated to fighting miniatures battles with Legos. No, I’m not kidding. You have got to see it to believe it. There’s a Lego Napoleonics battle that makes me want to raid my kids’ collection.
Miniatures Rules
Near Run Thing Napoleonics Rules
A Near Run Thing is a set of Napoleonics rules by Peter Hunt of the Hong Kong Society of Wargamers. From the members list, it seems that Hong Kong has quite a thriving miniature wargames community.
Back to the rules: A Near Run Thing apparently once was available as a commercial set, but now is revised and available on the net. Peter Hunt writes:
Modern and Sci Fi 6mm Buildings
Germ’s World has a large collection of paper models for wargames in 6mm scale. These would be useful for, say a BattleTech game, or maybe Epic 40k. There are hangars, moon bases, factories, space docks and middle east buildings.
Rugged Adventures Miniatures Game
Rugged Adventures, by Kurt Hummitzsch & Robert Murch is a set of free wargames rules written to support Murch’s line of Pulp Figures. These rules have a strong cinematic element, and players are expected to “contribute to the story development.”
Follow Me Men! Fantasy Rules
Jim Wallman has written “Follow Me, Men!”a set of free wargames rules for fantasy miniatures. Wallman describes these as “one brain cell rules”
These are rules for playing a wargame with toy soldiers. It is intended for several players – say 4 or more. Players control heroes (and, of course, heroines), who in turn have contingents of fighters under them.
The setting for fantasy games is one of a sort of mixed dark ages/medieval European environment. Recommended reading for this are the Conan books, Tolkein’s Middle Earth books and Terry Pratchet’s Diskworld books. There are thousands of heroic fantasy books, of course, but if you’ve read these you will at least know where the author of the rules is coming from.
Why ‘One Brain Cell’? Well, many sets of wargame rules these days are horrendously complicated, with big thick rule books to read, dozens of additional books to get (at unreasonable expense) and exceptionally complicated rule mechanisms that take ages to work out.
My brain is too simple for this, so I tend to write rules that one require a single brain cell to use and understand. This tends to make games easy to learn and play, and, amazingly, are just as much fun as the dense and complicated game rules for which you have to pay a King’s ransom. Odd, isn’t it?