That said, of you want to get into mini wargaming: welcome! It's a ton of fun to stage a battle (zombies, WWII, American Civil War, Sci-Fi, fantasy, etc.) on a nice table, with good looking terrain and well painted figures. Zombicide has minis you can paint, or not, as you see fit. If you want to play a zombie minis game, there are a few that you can try without jumping into the deep end of All Things Zombie and the minis purchase and painting that entails: So miniature wargames, for me, is the perfect storm of hobby. I love to paint minis, and I love to make terrain. Miniatures wargamers can spend more time on the hobby than actually playing the games. If that's not for you, you may enjoy hex and counter wargames more. By "hobby" I mean painting miniatures and making terrain. For myself, I feel like I may have found my holy grail.In my opinion, if you play miniature wargames, you need to like the hobby aspect of it. Just like DBA is not for everyone, OHW will not be a perfect fit for all wargamers (what rules are?), but I must emphasise that they are not just for beginners.
So in terms of this being a review, I guess I'd give One Hour Wargames 5 stars out of 5, because it works for the sort of games I want to play. Originally I had planned to fight a GNW campaign using an adaptation of Neil's Napoleonic Wargaming rules. There has been ample room to introduce these things and not totally unbalance the system, nor over-complicate it - I print the rules out on a double sided sheet of A4 in a booklet format. My tinkering with the Great Northern Wars variant is based on bits of the horse and musket and the pike and shot rules together with some of my own little quirks (I like base removal to show the deterioration of unit effectiveness for instance). Either Mr Thomas is very good at fluking it, or he put quite a bit of time into designing the rules and scenarios to work together. Even unbalanced scenarios have well thought out objectives and turn limits. The scenarios in One Hour Wargames are designed to work with the rules and army sizes that are given, and they really do work. But they still take some adaptation to whatever period you are playing. If you have the Grant books then you do indeed have a fantastic reservoir of ideas for scenarios (and I would add the Tabletop Teasers that ran through the Battlegames magazine to the other books named by Paul). One Hour Wargames ticks all of the above boxes. I also like rules that I can play on a small space in the lounge during winter - I have a 3'x 3' card table that I can set up, as opposed to the 8'x 4'which is in the garage. They should ideally be able to be turned into a narrative campaign. Second point - What are you looking for in a set of rules? For me they need to be able to be used solo to allow me to concentrate on the game and not the rules mechanisms and to be relatively quick so that they can be played out between my children's bedtimes and my own. There are a lot of experienced wargamers out there doing things with these rules. Martin Rapier recently published his latest variant that he is using for Jutland among others. On the AMW yahoo group variants can be found that cover the Italian Wars, Spanish Civil War, Russo-Turkish War and more. Well these do play straight out of the box for the periods they cover, but they are so much more versatile than that. Some might be put off by this, demanding a ruleset that suits them straight out of the box, as it were. They are also a system that is easy to tinker with. They are uncluttered, easy to remember and give a very enjoyable game.
So what do we (Royal or collective 'we' as I can't necessarily speak for others) like about them? Well one of the selling points is the very simplicity that makes them so good for beginners. It also doesn't include people like Bob Cordery who has also taken them to heart. Yes, they will work well for beginners to wargaming, but that doesn't describe me and I like them. But I also think there are some other points that I would like to add to the review for a bit of balance.įirst point - the rules are for beginners. I think at face value there is a lot to agree with in this analysis. He makes quite a few valid points, saying that the rules are really aimed at beginners and if you have any of the Charles Grant scenario books (which I do) then even the scenario section is largely superfluous. A couple of days ago Paul from the Man Cave posted a review of One Hour Wargames by Neil Thomas.