Arguing when… wargames
My journey into designing wargame rules telling the tale of battles – historical, fictional or otherwise – based on the MATRIX wargaming concept
On July 14th we will be at the Joys of Six (link) in Sheffield, UK. The 6mm wargaming event! We will be hosting a Gaugamela participation game. If you’re interested please drop us a note via janwillemboots@gmail.com
40 years of wargaming had me play many different wargame rules. I greatly enjoyed each one of them. I also moved on more than once. That’s what wargamers do. With every new design small issues pop up as they are played more and more. Often due to intense competition play, but also for all the right reasons, and yet…
Looking back at those years I decided to also be a designer, not just a wargame rule consumer. To add a new design and help this great hobby forward. Credits for this must also go to the guys of Little Wars TV and my friend Robert when he mentioned in passing “… they also create their own rules”, making me think to myself: what’s is holding me back? The answer of course: nothing!
And so I started. One decision I took at the beginning: The design will be based on the MATRIX wargaming concept created by Chris Engle in the late 1980s. A straightforward website explaining it can be found here, and some simple searches will quickly give you many resources. Another useful site with several downloads is PAXsims.
Today MATRIX games are on the rise in particular for professional and educational use. Mostly by the military. So there must be something to it… and there is! Hugely simple, yet enormously powerful and flexible. The challenge is bringing MATRIX wargaming to the tabletop. I now believe to have done so by designing the ruleset Der Söldner for battles of the mid-14th to mid-17th century, and The Warrior as a supplement covering the ancient to medieval period. My hope is you find that I have succeeded.
And so here is this site. To the point and simple. It has all the blogs (see below or click here) on the test, trial and error games as well as my thinking, wondering and pondering that have now resulted in Der Söldner and The Warrior. The scenario briefings can be found at a sub-site (click here).
Der Söldner is available as hardcopy (paperback and hardcover) via http://www.boekscout.nl. The Warrior is a free, PDF-only supplement available at this site and at the Wargame Vault on a pay-what-you-like basis.
I have also added a sub-site with usefull materials (click here) such as Quick Reference Sheets (QRS) for Der Söldner and measuring sticks. For The Warrior these are included in the PDF.
Blog-46: The battle at the Granicus – 334 BC
At the Joys of Six (link) we are going to do Gaugamela as a participation demo. To prepare for that doing one of the preceding battles of Alexander seemed like a good idea. Get a feel of how those battles work out using The Warrior. It proved a good idea. Not just for seeing how…
Blog-45: Downscaling: The (fictional) combat of Mühldorf, 1633ish
Der Söldner is scale agnostic. 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 28mm, etc. they all work. But table size, miniature scale, basing sizes, and ground scale must match for a good game. An error I made some time ago. When I designed the rules I mostly played at 15mm scale on the classic 120cmx180cm tabletop. However, at the…
Blog-44: Gaugamela – 331 BC
On July 14th I will be at The Joy of Six (link) in Sheffield, UK. The aim is to showcase The Arguing when… wargame rules at the world’s biggest small-scale wargames show run by Baccus6mm. Together with my Friend Robert I’ll be hosting a Gaugamela participation game. The reason for going to JoS is that…
Arguing when... wargames 