Britons Celtic Warband Skirmishes

Jim Wallman, creator of many excellent free miniature wargames rules sets has released another: Britons!

Jim writes that in Britons!, players control heroes (and, of course, heroines), who in turn have contingents of fighters under them:

These rules concentrate on the actions in a raid. Raids could involve anything from a few dozen to several hundred, and could involve considerable fighting.

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.

Factions Gang Skirmish Rules

Inferno Games offers a set of free wargames rules called “Factions”. It’s designed for 25mm to 28mm skirmish games. Here’s what the authors say:

Factions is a squad based game of warfare between rival gangs. Many stories could be created as to why they are at war with each other. The Core Rule book covers all the rules you will need to begin playing. It includes:

* Short guide on how to play.
* Rules for creating a Space Marine Faction
* Weapons & Equipment
* Vehicles

Factions is similer in many way to a plethora of Games Workshop games (because that is what we based it on). It resembles, in my opinion, a mix of Inquisitor, Necromunda and Mordheim. To play you also recquire many dice including d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20. Also having a d% (a dice with 1-10 on in and a dice with 10, 20 30 ect.) is helpful, although it can be made by having two seperate coloured dice.

Fight Dice Rules

Fight Dice is a set of free wargames rules that uses a neat dice pool system, where the players allocate handsfull of six sided dice to their actions.

Caliburn’s Wrath Arthurian Rules

Caliburn’s Wrath is a set of free wargames rules from Matt Cappetta for the Arthurian period. The rulesCaliburn’s Wrath are “intended to represent intense clashes between small bands of foot soldiers.”

Urban Myth Cyberpunk Rules

Jon Clarke has writtenUrban Myth , a set of free wargames rules set in a kind of a near future cyberpunk setting. What makes these rules stand out is in the basic die mechanism. It uses a d100 system (rolling two ten-sided dice), but you read the dice differently depending upon the difficulty level of the task:

All rolls are on d100 needing to get equal to or less than the Attribute being tested against.
How the dice are read depends on the difficulty of the test. If the action is easier it may be reduced one step or more, if harder increased one step or more.
There are three levels of difficulty for any task:
Easy: roll d100, read the dice the worst way in relation to the task (generally speaking you read the dice to fail, but if they succeed either way place the lowest dice as tens)
Normal: roll d100, identify one dice as tens & one as units before rolling.
Hard: roll d100, read the dice however you like.