After having observed many figure based combat simulation games, I became convinced that the games were mostly designed to sell figures. Being way to cheap too buy into that sort of game, I long wanted to make one based on cheap readily available army men. Something like brikwars but not so complicated. With the large number of army men given as gifts this x-mas, I finally was inspired to really do it.
The basic needs of the game are a place to play, a sack of army men, a tape measure or yardstick, and a six-sided die. The rules should all fit on a single sheet of paper with a reasonable font size. Realism is not a goal. The idea is for the snacks and drinks to cost more than the game pieces, and for you to be able to buy both at the same store.
Setup consists of clearing the table, and setting up any desired obsticles with books, cans, legos, whatever is handy. Both players should agree on obstacle placement. Players should also agree on the goal/setting of the engagement, number of men per side, and terms of victory.
Play is handled in turns, in each turn, a player may have each of his men take one action step. An action step consists of two parts: Shooting and action. If the man is to shoot, he must shoot before moving, this is to give the advantage to a fixed position/ambush setup.
Shooting proceeds as follows: Select a enemy man as the target, then use the tape measure to determine if he is in range, and if there is a line of sight between the two men. If these conditions are met, the shooter rolls one dice per rate of fire, and kills the enemy man on a roll of 6 if the enemy is in range, and 5 or 6 if the enemy is within 1/2 of the maximum range.
For movement, the man can move any distance up to the rated movement number of inches, and movement does not need to be in a straight line. Men can climb obstacles as long as they are not taller than the man. No penalty is applied for climbing. Prone men can climb the height of a standard man. Men moving beyond the edge of the table cannot be returned to play.
If two opposing men come into contact, they will fight hand-to-hand, both players will roll 1D6. The attacking player can add 1 to his score. The lowest scoring man will die. In the event of a tie, the fight will continue into the next turn. In the next turn, niether man can attack, and the attacked man can choose to run away, or continue the fight, taking the attack +1 advantage.
Each type of army man is assigned three attributes: Movement and Range in inches, rate of fire in number of rolls.
| Main types of army men | |||
| movement | range | rate of fire. | |
| Rifleman | 6 | 20 | 1 |
| Submachinegun | 6 | 10 | 2 |
| Machinegunner | 3 | 20 | 2 |
prone men have half the movement, but double the range of a standing army man. Regular men cannot be switched back and forth with prone men. For simplicity, kneeling men are considered to be standing.
| area affect weapons: | |||
| movement | range | rate of fire. | |
| mortar/bazooka/rpg | 2 | 40 | 1/2 |
| grenedier | 6 | 10 | 1 |
| flamethrower | 3 | 10 | 1 |
Area effect weapons (except grenades) are heavy and hard to move, so the man cannot fire and move in the same turn. When shooting an area effect weapon, the shooting player selects a target man (must have line of sight to aim), all men (on any side) within 6 inches of the target man must roll 1d6 and if a 6 is rolled, that man will die.
When a man dies, he is knocked over (or placed upsidedown for prone men) and left on the table. Dead men cannot be returned to play.
Doing a search, I found other games with plastic army men but most were too complex:
http://alliancemartialarts.com/1BCToySoldiers.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20030213130337/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Saturn/8423/armymen.html
This one was simple enough, but don't like actually throwing stuff around.
http://www.angelfire.com/games2/warpspawn/GPM.html
Also found this older game by none other than H.G.Wells. It seems to require having guns that really shoot tho. I did like the idea of there being a time limit to each turn to put pressure on the players:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/ltwrs11.txt