Justified Ancients is a set of free wargames rules for simple ancients battle games. The author writes:
Justified Ancients is a fast paced element based wargame that takes simple mechanics to produce a beleivable result. Easy to learn they are percet for filling in that last half hour before the Pub or playing a huge battle in two hours.
Wargames Research Group has a page with lots of their older sets available, including the Fifth Edition Ancients, which were the standard for many years.
Here’s a photo montage of our recent game featuring Israelites vs Philistines in a bronze age skirmish. The rules were a home made variant of Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings Skirmish Rules.
The Philistines had superior numbers and were better in hand-to-hand combat. The Israelites had a high percentage of missile troops (bow and sling) who were poor in close combat, but were led by Judges (as in Gideon and Ehud, not Dredd). It was a near thing, but in the end, the might of the Judges prevailed.
Mesopotamia Birth of Civilization is a free, downloadable board game by Garry Stevens designed to teach the history of the Fertile Crescent. Garry writes:
Mesopotamia follows the rise and fall of twenty nations from the Sumerians to the Persians over two thousand years of history. It purloins freely from those wonderful classic games Civilisation, History of the World, and Ancient Conquests, to which I owe a huge debt. The game is more historical than Civilisation, but less world-encompassing than History of the World (HOTW). The basic system is that of History of the World, but with one very significant difference.
The Games: Blood and Spectacle are a set of free wargames rules for gladiator games.