Three Simple Toy Soldier Rule Sets

The purpose of this blog was so that I could occasionally post about toy soldier topics without doing so on my older blog, Opinions Can Be Wrong, where I write about films, video games, books and other topics. I don't know how often (if ever) I intend to post on here, but we'll see how things go.

I like collecting and playing with toy soldiers and have since I was a kid, but for me one of the biggest problems is the rules. Unless it's a free-for-all, as kids play, every toy soldier game has some set of rules or another, and many of them are complex, granular and fiddly, taking a long time to learn as well as play. I don't have much patience for that, because I find slow rule systems boring and even for historical games I don't care for painstakingly accurate simulation of what a real battle might be like; give me something halfway between history and Hollywood. Further, complex rules can make the game into something which is not fun. Unless you're aiming for some kind of artistic experience where your game is intended to replicate the hell of war, I'd prefer a game that was fun, and for me that means a game which is easy to understand and quick to play, and here I want to discuss and recommend three sets of toy soldier rule sets I play occasionally at the tabletop gaming club of which I'm a member, or with friends.

For context, I mostly collect individually-based 28mm figures. I collect toy soldiers for games in numerous historical settings, including (as of time of writing), late antiquity, the early middle ages, the 17th century, the Napoleonic Wars, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the First and Second World Wars. I also collect science fiction and fantasy miniatures and have a long-running project for "book accurate Tolkien" toy soldiers (wholly eschewing the designs of the films) and which inspired the title of this blog. Here are three systems I recommend.

The "Rampant" Systems

Published by Osprey Books and written by Daniel Mersey with occasional co-writing by Michael Leck, there are five books in what I would consider to be the "core" Rampant systems: Lion Rampant, for medieval warfare (including late antiquity and the dark ages); Dragon Rampant, for one-size-fits-all fantasy wargaming; The Pikeman's Lament, for (late) 16th and 17th century pike-and-shot wargaming;  The Men Who Would Be Kings for late 19th and early 20th century colonial warfare; and Rebels and Patriots for horse-and-musket 18th to mid-19th-century warfare. I've listed them in order of publication. There's another rule set for Dark Ages warfare by Mersey called Dux Bellorum but it's different enough from the other Rampant games for me to not include it here, and I haven't played it.

Without going into too much detail, these rules are all very simple, too simple according to some criticisms. Most units are made up of six or twelve figures. They can move, shoot (if they have ranged weapons) and fight in close combat. Activation is by a two-dice (2D6) roll. There are infantry, cavalry and, in some of the games, artillery. Leaders have special abilities, in some cases randomly and in others by choice. Units suffer penalties as they take damage, although the exact thresholds for this vary from set to set slightly. Unless one scales the default game size up or down, the number of models generally on the table is around fifty or sixty per side, although this can vary. The games are quick; last time I played Lion Rampant at the club we played two regular-sized games in probably a little over two hours total, one hour per game. The rules are simple and easy to learn.

As I say, some argue that the rules are too simple and make drastically different eras of history too interchangeable. I'm not too worried, however, as long as something gets, say, my Napoleonic collection on the table and doesn't need a rulebook the size of an encyclopedia. The games are definitely open to house-ruling and customisation, although that really depends on your opponent, and I won't deny that rules-as-written may seem a little limiting at times, especially in Dragon Rampant, which presents itself as being flexible enough to represent any kind of fantasy wargaming you could imagine. The slightly older systems in the family of rules, Lion Rampant and Dragon Rampant, also have a default rule that if you fail to activate a unit on a 2D6 roll then play passes to your opponent. Some players despise this rule and it has been eased with an optional alternative in the new Lion Rampant edition in which you simply move onto your next available unit if you fail to activate one; you don't lose the rest of your turn.

I understand most of the criticisms of the Rampant rule sets. Nonetheless, I think they're an excellent set of rules for one reason: they're an easy way to have a game with historical miniatures. To touch upon Napoleonics again, I find the Napoleonic period really interesting, but I just can't be bothered learning Warlord Games' Black Powder or TooFatLardies' Sharp Practice. The entire main rules for Rebels and Patriots is only 17 pages long. That makes a difference. Players who want more historical flavour may want to tweak them, or may find them too simple, but here's the thing: plenty of people I suspect would like to collect historical miniatures, but either expect that they'd need too many or that there'll be too many rules. Picture the stereotype of middle-aged men pushing around stands of thousands of lead figures alongside a hundred-page manual to recreate Waterloo, or some such thing. With the Rampant games you need neither. To slightly paraphrase myself when I reviewed one of the Rampant games online, these games get your historical miniatures on the table.

"Squad Hammer" Systems

Published by Nordic Weasel Games and written by Ivan Sorensen, these rules too are simple and use an element of abstraction to speed things up. While the Rampant rule sets I've described above cover pretty much everything from the fall of Rome to the Edwardian era, Sorensen's Squad Hammer games are my current rule-set of choice for everything after. Trench Hammer covers the First World War, Hammer of Democracy the Second, and the general Squad Hammer rules handle virtually any modern or science-fictional conflict you could name, with a number of optional add-ons such as Man to Man and the Options Pack enabling further customisation. There's also a game I haven't tried called October Hammer for the Russian Civil War.

Squad Hammer type games are perhaps even simpler than the Rampant ones I described before. Each player has a few squads and potentially a leader. You roll a couple of dice and take one, which is the number of units you can activate that turn. Units can move, shoot, attack in close combat or try to regroup. Figures don't fire individually; you roll 2D6 for the whole unit, trying to beat a target value agreed upon by your opponent, although some default values are offered for guidance. There is a "gentleperson's agreement" method to the whole thing; say a unit of German stoßtruppen in the Spring of 1918 are assaulting a British position. We might assume a default value of 7 or higher for the German unit to hit the British, but there is some rubble in the way, increasing it to an 8 or higher. But let's say the Germans have a machine gun in their unit; this might bring it back down to 7 or even 6 depending on the weapon. The players decide. Units again deteriorate in quality the more they take damage, which is tracked with a single damage score representing both casualties and falling morale.

Competitive players may find the "rules by agreement" method of the Squad Hammer games too nebulous. Not all of the sets have points systems, and those that do don't account for everything, especially since the games encourage mixing and matching different units from different games. For instance, Trench Hammer has rules for officers but doesn't have a points system at all, while Hammer of Democracy has a points system, but doesn't have its own rules for officers (I plug them in from Squad Hammer Man to Man). Not all tanks of the Second World War are covered and players are encouraged to develop their own, but again this comes with an understanding that players will be in agreement.

As with Rampant, this game may not be for everyone, especially for those dependent on rigidly costed historical systems like those from Warlord Games for a sense of balance and certainty. I myself admit that it's hard to shake the feeling "but these two platoons aren't exactly balanced in points", as if a historical engagement were ever like that. Indeed, Sorensen gives as an example that, if you want to follow conventional military wisdom for attack-defend scenarios, the attacker should play with about three times the men/firepower/resources as the defender, something unthinkable in a points-style game, because in real life that's what real attackers would try to do if they had the means.

But regardless of any looseness to things, the fact was that the first time I played Trench Hammer, with its 12-ish pages of main rules, I went from knowing nothing about them to having played my first game in about an hour. And in a game of Hammer of Democracy, with about 46 pages of "main" rules (including more granular rules for support weapons like artillery and tanks that won't be used in every game) I was, despite abstractions, able to execute a textbook fire-and-manoeuvre action in which a resourceful British section dislodged an emplaced squad of dogged German Fallschirmjäger first by pinning them with fire from a Bren gun, blinding them with smoke from a 2" light mortar and then flushing them out with an advancing rifle section. Yes, any decent set of World War 2 rules should be able to do this, but Hammer of Democracy not only could but did it easily. One should think of the "Battle Consensus" rules-by-agreement system as this rule set's method of achieving balance; if your opponent is being, as the rules put it, a "jerk" about a situation, the problem is most likely with them, and not the rules.

"One Page Rules"

During the pandemic lockdowns, my former flatmate, without having enough distractions, clearly, told me that he was thinking of getting back into Warhammer 40,000 again, and that we should dig up our old figures and have a game. I sighed and went to go find a copy of whatever edition of the rules I could, and then I remembered something, and I went back to him and said, "I can't be bothered re-learning how to play 40K. Let's just play One Page Rules." We started with the science fiction rule set Grimdark Future, and later got into the fantasy counterpart, Age of Fantasy.

Games Workshop should thank Gaetano Ferrara, aka "onepageanon". I used to love Games Workshop toy soldiers. I don't love them anymore, but despite how ridiculously expensive they are in Australia I don't hate all of them, and some of the designs I'm still fond of. But one thing I couldn't face going back to was the rules. Games Workshop rules are not for me, not anymore when there are so many alternatives. I don't really know what they're even like anymore given how much I believe they've changed, but from what I remember as a kid they were over-complicated, imbalanced and unfair. They were a clunky system from the 80s that was original in that decade but had never been innovated upon, and by the 2000s they were simply skewed to favour whichever latest collection Games Workshop wanted to sell. One Page Rules does not have these problems.

Created as an alternative to Games Workshop's much-complained-about rules, One Page Rules has rules for every army Games Workshop has ever produced (including some they don't actually make anymore, like Bretonnia). These fit, in most cases, on two sides of one page. The main rules themselves also fit on two sides of one page. Units move, shoot, fight in close combat and test their morale if they take damage. I went from telling my former flatmate that we were going to play One Page Rules and not 40K to us having had two games with figures neither of us had used in probably a decade in the space of, again, a couple of hours. And for the first time in nearly as long we actually went and bought new toy soldiers from Games Workshop.

But we didn't touch Games Workshop rules. And I became a Patreon subscriber to One Page Rules because despite the fact that the main rules and all of the army lists are completely free it seemed only fair to give a little each month to the people who had reignited my enthusiasm for the big, silly kind of toy soldier fantasy and sci-fi games that Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 used to be about. They make armies of their own via 3D printing, and their army lists, which cover a vast number of fantasy archetypes with any specific company's serial numbers metaphorically filed off, also cover other manufacturers. As a result, amusingly, you can have armies based on Games Workshop's collections fight armies based on products created by their major competitor, Mantic Games. There's even a points calculator (for subscribers) so that you can completely customise units and entire armies from scratch. It's not the subtlest or most detailed game in the world, but it's easy, it's fast, and it's fun. I wish these rules had existed when I was a kid. I feel like nothing else I could say could recommend them more.

Conclusion

I haven't played that many tabletop rule sets. Yet despite not completely being an old Grognard I can be a bit set in my ways: I want rules I can learn now, not have to study for a month before my first game. I want them to be easy to understand. I want them to be close enough to what they're trying to replicate, or have room for me to customise to suit my own preferences. I want them to be fast to play, so I can have a couple of games in little more than a couple of hours. I want them to be fun. With that in mind, these are my current preferences:

Medieval, Early Modern and Napoleonic (and more "grounded" fantasy): Rampant
First and Second World War: Squad Hammer
Big, silly old-school sci-fi and fantasy: One Page Rules

I love collecting and painting toy soldiers for games. It's nice to be able to actually enjoy the games, too.