Introduction

Ancient & Medieval covers the period from the earliest civilisations upto the end of the middle ages (the end of feudalism and the revolution in warfare brought about by the introduction of gunpowder). My main interest over the years has been in the Hundred Years War between England and France, but the ancient period is a never ending source of inspiration.

I have variously collected the following armies:

• Ancient Assyrians (c.700 BC)
• Dark Ages English and Norse (c. 1000 AD)
• Hundred Years War English and French (c. 1415 AD)
• Samurai (skirmish-level)

Rules

NEW! Read my review of the new Crusader rules.

I favour the following rules systems:

For the ancient period up until early medieval, I like Armati. However, the army lists are terrible, you should create your own based on better historical research. The best researched source for army lists is without question the Wargames Research Group DBM series. Unfortunately it seems that you can either be a good game designer or a good researcher, and not both. This is a problem that plagues a lot of historical periods.

At the moment, WAB (Warhammer Ancient Battles) is very popular. Personally, I don't think they're that great, based as they are on Warhammer, which is unrealistic even for fantasy! The fact that this set is so popular says an awful lot about the hobby, mainly how hard it is to find really good rules. However, a big factor in their popularity is the lovely model photographs and high quality of presentation, as well as their general 'friendliness'. This is especially true because they are in complete contrast to WRG's rulesets which previously dominated the ancients landscape. WRG rules are very dry, with no illustations or photographs and not much period flavour, and expressed in legalistic terms. Does the perfect rule set exist yet? No.

For the medieval period, specifically for the Hundred Years War, I wrote my own rules. When I was a teenager I used to use a set called Lance. These were derived from the WRG rules which were popular at the time, before the DBA/DBM series, but were tailored specifically to the medieval period. I enjoyed those games, but always with increasing dissatisfaction, because my battles were nothing like the real thing! For example, if I were to try and reproduce those famous battles like Crecy and Agincourt, you can be sure you would get the opposite result. They were not very clever rules and assumed that numbers were everything, so an army which is outnumbered will always lose. So I sat down and developed a set based on serious study of why real battles gave the results they did. The answer is quite interesting, and the subject of a long essay. The two most important factors were: medieval command and control (or rather, the lack of it); and unit cohesion.

Greek-Persian War

Inspired by an article and set of rules in issue 1 of Battlegames, I bought some plastic soldiers and started to look at wargaming the Greek-Persian Wars. I modified the rules so much they are really a different set now. I am very pleased with the rules, except that they need dice or counters to represent unit attrition. I prefer to avoid counters and record keeping if possible, but I have come to the conclusion that keeping track of unit attrition is almost unavoidable for a simple but realistic simulation of battle. See the rules in the Downloads page.

Samurai

I have created a draft set of rules for what I call Samurai Heroic Skirmish. See the Downloads section. These are based on Games Workshop's Lord Of The Rings rule system, which is a scalable heroic skirmish game system and therefore ideally suited as a starting point for medieval Samurai. The rules are inspired by the Book of Five Spheres and other reading, in a way that's too deep to go into here.

I always intended to develop a campaign system on the back of them, whereby players could lead and develop bands of Samurai. Each band would choose a basis like Ronin, Outlaws, Clan warriors or Monks.