Samurai Knight Fever is a set of free wargames rules for Japan’s Age of Battles: 1550-1615. The author is Tod Kershner, who is the designer of popular and established wargames rules including Warfare in the Age of Reason, Age of Discovery, Age of Napoleon, Pig Wars, A Firebell in the Night and Iroquois Terror.
Kershner is a friend of mine, and I have long enjoyed playing in his games.
Samurai Blades is one of a series of board games published in 1984 by Standard Games and by now long out of print. The game was essentially a skirmish game played on a hex board, with cardboard miniatures. Each character in the game was represented by several pieces, each depicting a different level of damage and injury. The web page at the link has lots of resources for the game, including the rules and gifs, tiffs, and jpgs of the pieces and boards. This is really useful if you have the game but have lost one of those aforementioned damage markers.
Given the high levels of current interest in games set in Shogunate Japan, I thought people might be interested in these hand colored photographs of Japan from 1865. That’s several hundred years after the period in question, but I should think they would still be useful.
A Most Honorable Victory is a set of free wargames rules for miniatures games set in 15th and 16th century Japan.
Daimyo is a set of free wargames rules for samurai battles in 15mm.
From the website:
Daimyo is a set of wargames rules intended for use with 15mm scale wargames figures but can easily be used with other scales (although I for one won’t be painting any 6mm samurai!). The rules cover the period known as The Age of the Country at War or Sengoku-Jidai. This was a period when samurai armies became much more organised, the importance of the ashigaru infantryman was recognised and the increasing use of firearms altered samurai warfare forever. It was also an age that produced some great commanders such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomo Hideyoshi, Takeda Shingen, Uesugi Kenshin and Tokugawa Ieyasu to name but a few. And, in a period of continual warfare, there were hundreds of battles, some of them epic encounters like Nagashino, Sekigahara and Kawanakajima. It is my hope that Daimyo will capture some of the excitement of this colourful and unique period of history