Rex Hurley has written a set of free wargames rules for playing Last of the Mohicans with 25mm – 28mm wargames miniatures. The rules are relatively simple, and include statistics for all of the main characters, such as Hawkeye, Uncas, Chingachgook, Magua, et. al.
There’s also a page of pictures for inspiration.
Years ago, I played in a play-by-mail game called “Its a Crime.” In that game, you were in charge of a street gang and tried to wrest control of city blocks from the other gang leaders (players). These free wargames rules from the Lincoln Miniature Warfare Society allow you to do the same thing on the miniatures gaming tabletop.
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.”
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?
Tanzanica is a set of free wargames rules for Darkest Africa adventures by Brett Abbott. The rules actually are a variant of Games Workshop’s Mordheim miniatures rules, which are themselves free at the Games Workshop living rules archive. Mordheim is a neat set of rules for the kind of game where each player controls a small group of characters, with one uber-character and several flunkies.