Fast Play Games

About

​Hi, I’m Ben King and I’ve been a wargamer since I was in junior high school and a professional war game designer since the 1970’s. From 1984 to 1992 as Chief of Simulations for the U.S. Army Transportation School, I designed war games for the US Army. My objective with Small War Games is to provide rules that are Fast Accurate and Fun. Small War rules are easy to learn and easy to play and have only 1 Combat Card with all the tables needed to play the game. 

The first wargames I played were H.G. Wells’ “Little Wars” with model soldiers and “Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game” with model ships. Although Fletcher Pratt’s rules were only about 35 pages, the formulae for calculating ships’ values were tedious and complex. The ship values were astronomical. Bismark’s base number was around 260,000. Ranges of guns were as long as 18 feet. You needed a ballroom or a gym to play in. Those rules and many of the ones I played in subsequent years were also overdone. One Napoleonic set of rules was 149 pages long and some units were as large as 60 figures. Casualties were computed with a formula that slowed the game down. Battles were drawn-out and took up a lot of space. 

By the 1970s the gaming community found that time, the cost of figures and space were limited. To make games more manageable, less costly and faster, I designed the TAC-50 system in the mid-1970s. They were the first fast play rules. They are still around today. The rules were around 35 pages long, the ground scale was 4” = 100 yards and the figure ratio to actual men was 1:50 so that units were less than half the size of those called for in other rules.

In the mid-1990s, gamers asked if I could design a game that could be played at work during lunch. “Small War” a game that could be played on the edge of a cluttered desk was the result. It required a 2 foot X 2-foot playing area for 15mm figures or a 40” X 40” area for 25mm figures. It worked so well that twice a week a friend and I sat, sandwich in one hand and dice in the other playing a wargame in the office. I applied the same philosophy to other types of rules. The results were sets of skirmish rules which you can find on the Land Rules page and a series of 2-page rules to be released soon. That’s right, 2 pages. Easy to learn and easy to play, very fast, historically accurate and fun. Check them out on the Land Rules page.

SMALL WAR AT SEA follows the Small War philosophy. They are a series of simplified rules that cover naval warfare from the Age of Sale to WWII. Revised and refined, the rules have factors for nearly every class of ship for the era. A combat card has all the tables needed for play. Ranges are around 20” so that a game can be played on a kitchen table instead of a gym. Players copy the damage card and fill in the data for each ship. They move the ships, measure the ranges, roll the dice and then check off the damage blocks. IT’S THAT SIMPLE. Speed scales, turning circles, torpedo wakes and smoke templates are included in each set of rules.
 
Have Fun!
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