The Great Game is a set of free wargames rules for big Colonial battles. You can find it in the Colonial Wars Yahoo group. The author writes:
These rules were born out of my personal desire to play large scale colonial actions in one evening. Many of the existing sets of rules were designed for skirmish or competition games and were thus either too small scale or too complex. The only other types of rules covered just one of the colonial wars, and my wish to see how my colonial British Army faced up and defeated many different enemies forced me into writing my own set of rules.
In battle, many things get forgotten and this is just as true in the miniature version. How many times have you forgotten how many casualties that you inflicted on that enemy unit? So these rules do not count how many figures you have lost, they count how many you have left!
The figure scale is variable, so that a single British Infantry figure represents fifteen men, while a single Zulu represents thirty. Using this method one only need paint two Zulus for every one British figure to outnumber the British four to one.
This set of rules cover the Zulu War, the occupation of Egypt in 1882, the Mahdist wars of 1884 and 1896, the Boxer Rebellion, the Second Boer War 1900, and the 1st Sikh War 1845.
The rules are designed so that a large game with say 300 native figures and 100 Europeans will last about a couple of hours. Therefore many of the differences between early muzzle loading and later breech loading rifles have been simplified. Using these rules it is possible to win with native armies in situations where they did win although losses will be quite horrendous! But the proof is in the playing so may your Gatling never jam and on with the ‘Great Game’.