fantasy

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?