Anybody tried the ‘Grid Wargaming Table Top Battles Rules’?

[Andrew Beasley]

They are available from http://www.gridwargaming.co.uk but TBH I’ve never really seen anything about them and a quick search did not turn up anything solid bar from a mention here.

There is an unanswered thread here and the author has a few posts but nothing active since the end of 2019 so I am unsure if these are ‘dead’ or not…

 

[bobm]

Some of the battle reports are more recent.  Wilson’s Creek (ACW) was apparently posted in 2021.

I generally approve of gridded wargames tables but I’ve never heard of this set before now.  Not sure about one set of rules covering all periods however.

 

There's 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.....

[Guy Farrish]

There is a short review/overview here –littlewarsrevisited.

This suggests there are period specific factors added to the combat mechanisms (dba lite!) which allow a different feel for the periods.

I know it is a current theme to take a set of rules written for a specific war/period and extend them back and forward for centuries but that always suggests to me there was something odd about their representation of what they were trying to do in the first place or people have missed the point of the other periods they are blanket covering.

I may be wrong of course. Not unheard of!

However my point being that it sounds like a very fast and simple game – not  a criticism – but perhaps not the best representation of a particular period of warfare in a wargame – which might be a criticism depending what you want from a game.

People are certainly using them – there is a link to a Viking/Saxon game played last November in the forum linked to above. They enjoyed them.

[Andrew Beasley]

Thanks for those thoughts.

I use the One Hour rules and see they struggle with shoehorning WW2 into the basic framework by lumping all AFVs into ‘tanks’ and dropping aircraft totally.

Currently I’m OK with these rules as I’m only playing simple games (mix of ACW / Napoleonic / Imagi- nation) but would like to go a little more HG Wells / Steampunk without re-inventing the wheel at some point rather than historic.

I think I’ll dig though the Portable Wargame / 3×3 rules and ponder.

[MartinR]

I bought them, played a few games and enjoy the blog posts (which have mainly been Dark Ages over the last year). They were one of the inspirations for the Portable Wargame. I’ve not used them more widely as they need quite a lot of grid squares which isn’t so good for remote play.

Wrt OHW WW2, it is very simple to chrome them up a bit, although my WW2 iteration is based on the Ancient set as I prefer battalion and regiment sized units.

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

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