Irregular Wars Wargaming

I'm delighted to announce the release of Fantastic Scuffles , the skirmish wargaming toolkit designed for any fantasy or pre-modern historical setting. Fantastic Scuffles is designed to allow players to enjoy small-scale skirmishes with less than a dozen miniatures per player. It takes as its starting point the wargaming principles set out in its army-scale predecessor, Fantastic Battles (2020). Games should be engaging and unpredictable; force creation should be flexible, allowing players to play their fantasy. Being both setting and scale agnostic, the rules can be used with whatever miniatures a player has at hand for scuffles in any fantastic realm or historic setting from the dawn of time until the early modern period. Using one set of core mechanics, the rules outline several different ways to play solo, co-op and oppositional games including randomised encounters between two parties, arena fights, and dungeon delving. Where is Fantastic Scuffles for sale? The best place b...

Find your niche, play your fantasy Irregular Wars Wargaming was born from a desire to play something different. To play historical games too niche to be a commercial success. To play fantasy games unshackled by somebody else’s world or the prescriptive demands to sell associated miniature ranges. To play games where the landscape drives decisions, and randomised events can allow even the most gamey players to snatch defeat from the jaws of glorious victory. With various tabletop wargames published through both Irregular Wars and Ganesha Games, my rules are designed to be engaging for all players throughout the game, employing randomised initiative with play passing quickly between players. They aim to create some degree of command friction, limiting the omnipotent control of the player and forcing interesting decision making. Above all, they are driven to be flexible, enabling players to build the armies, warbands, parties and fleets of their choice, applicable to whatever period or s...

I had the honour to be invited down to Cork College of FET - Douglas Street this week for a Fantastic Scuffles playtesting day with their first and second year game design students. Although they are studying computer game design, they have to create tabletop games as part of their assessment. It was a great day with more than 20 students putting Fantastic Scuffles through its paces, stress testing the mechanics and trying to find game-breaking loopholes in the rules. Where issues were identified, mostly driven by trait and equipment synergies, we talked through different approaches to resolve them and implemented a couple of changes. My thanks to Neil Crowley and all who took part. It was a great experience for me, and I hope that the discussions that we had around game mechanics and design choices were useful to the students as they prepare for their future careers. 

This week saw a much-needed rematch between my halfling militia from the shires and Roger's ogres from the northern tundra. Just a straight up battle between two 1,000 point armies, both hankering for a second serve of pie... The halflings were the defender, but the ogres used night march, so the armies deployed closer together than normal. Roger placed yetis and other fast beasties on either flank, tough ogre melee units inside that, and a unit of cannon-toting ogres in the centre, supported by a warlord riding a monstrous fantastic beast and an array of characters including two magic-users, each with level three blink. My halfling centre was composed of an elite hearthguard of spearmen (still militia), and units of kitchen militia and militia archers. The woods and rough ground were held by treefolk auxiliaries, while the mounted wing of poultry riders and cavalry (almost a pun) sat on the far left flank. A cockatrice and small indirect artillery battery provided support from beh...

This week Andy T and I faced off in the dungeon depths for another playtest of the dungeon crawling element of Fantastic Scuffles . Andrew ran a team of adventurers with four characters (two warriors, a sage and a rogue) and four minions (two archers and two spearmen). I returned to the roll of dungeon keeper, filling my dungeon with hidden movement tokens filled with potential. Knowing me, of course that potential was always going to include kobolds - this time with goblins! With such a large adventuring party, Andy split his team into two groups. All four minions and one of his warriors - the polearm toting knight - went left, discovering the wing of the dungeon populated by kobolds. Having slaughtered a group of kobold spearmen, they continued into the next room, finding the first of their treasure chests, but also running into a group pf kobold slingers led by a mighty (in his head anyway) kobold warrior. Although all the kobolds were to fall, it was not without cost, leaving all t...

I've just finished up this little swarm of 28mm goblings from Old School Miniatures. They will be treated as minions with the swarm trait in Fantastic Scuffles . These smaller goblin cousins have great character and a 1980s-90s vibe that made the kickstarter difficult to dismiss. Some of the casting was a little rough, but mounted five to a base, they are kind of irresistible.  Lets hope the enemy finds it that way too!

There is plenty of editing and page setting going on at the moment in Irregular Wars HQ, meaning there is relatively little new brush work going on. I have, however, finished up a couple of exceptions to that rule over the last couple of weeks, posted below. First up we have this fiercely majestic gryphon digitally sculpted by Cast N Play. Buying 3d printed minis from Etsy can be a bit hit and miss, but this was definitely a winner. She - for some reason I picture it as a female gryph - can either join a party or be used as a hostile fantastic beast. Then we have these four chests and two mimics from Onmioji Miniatures - essential for any dungeon delving! And lastly a couple of photos from our latest dungeon crawl using Fantastic Scuffles . While it looked touch and go for the adventurers in turns two and three, expedient spell casting left the so-called heroes as masters of the dungeon for the low low cost of the life of their halfling rogue.

The most challenging part of creating a fantasy skirmish game is building mechanisms to make dungeon crawling fun and challenging, while still engaging all players with smooth mechanics. The dungeon crawling rules for FS have been through multiple iterations now, switching between matched and asymmetrical parties, from hidden movement, to free-flowing visibility and back again. At this point, we feel the balance is about right, although further testing is, of course, going to be required!  Last week we played a three-player dungeon crawl, with two parties of adventurers attempting to raid the same dungeon through different entrances. Re-instituting hidden movement, my poor denizens were represented by mini playing cards until an adventurer came withing line of sight, when their true nature was revealed. Jim took a 100 point party of gnomes (top centre), Andy T controlled 100 points of Japanese bandits (centre right), will I had 200 points of kobolds dispersed throughout the dungeo...

Over the last few weeks I have been slowly plugging away at a few set dressings for playing dungeon crawl scenarios in  Fantastic Scuffles . So far I've only managed ten doors and two sarcophagi (both designed and sold by GatheringGroundsG), but it's a start.  The pieces work very well with the fantastic neoprene dungeon tiles from Tabletop Battlemats. These really are top quality and I'm very pleased with them. The white edges of the mats visible in the photo above are less obvious in hand, and I imagine running a black permanent marker around the edge will fixe any issue there. I bought one sarcophagus of each design. The undamaged one is actually cast from a marbled looking resin and I was a bit sad to paint over it. However, the other one needed paint on the skulls and vines, and I wanted both to look like they belonged together. For no particular reason I opted for purple vines rather than green or brown. Perhaps it is some sort of magical corruption? I based all the...

Having returned from a dander around France, Belgium and the Netherlands, we returned home to find that my wee lad's best mates are all away. A boon for me, as he agreed to play a couple of games of Fantastic Scuffles ! In the first game, I controlled my party five of rogues (mercenary, burglar, harlot, highwaywoman and potion dealer) who's objective was to knock out and abduct one of his party members. He controlled a foot knight, sorceress, ghost and two spear-armed minions who had been asked to acquire an item held (determined randomly) by my half-orc harlot. My highway woman took an early dislike to the sorceress, sneaking up to fire her pistol at short range. The sorceress was wounded, but still standing until the halfling burglar emerged behind her and finished the job.  The wee man's knight charged the potion's dealer who threw down a smoke bomb to escape. The knight then turned his attention to the burglar, taking revenge for the mess he'd made of the sorcer...