The War Game (1971)

Charles Grant's The War Game is a classic set of rules for "old school" miniature wargaming. The rules first appeared as a series of articles in Tradition magazine, a UK production aimed at painters of miniature soldiers. The published version is a 191-page hardcover book.

The era covered by the rules is vaguely the Seven Years War, generally known as the "Horse and Musket" era. One interesting feature of the game is that rather than strictly portray the historical era, The War Game invites creating fictional armies of the period so players can give their own grandiloquent names to their units and paint them using their own uniform designs.

The scales used for the game are pretty fuzzy. The miniatures are used singly, i.e., not mounted in multiples on a base as in most miniature wargames. An infantry brigade of two regiments is roughly 100 single figures. Maneuvering your units can be tedious, but it's easy to adopt any formation.

The War Game not only provides a set of rules, but each chapter provides a great deal of philosophy behind the rule with the actual game mechanics stated simply at the end. For example, the actual rules for moving infantry are very simple, but Grant takes four pages, with a lot of reasoning and reference to historical sources, to come to them.

The War Game is far from concise. However, it's not just a set of rules, it's a great read from one of miniature wargaming's founders.