No Brain Wargame Rules

    No Brain Wargames is a simple set of rules for fighting unorganized tribal battles. There is nothing original in the game and probably many who read this has played a similar game. The rules I give are how I usually play it, although I will use hexes and different figures and add optional rules.

The playing board is a chessboard.
Both armies have 24 men; 16 melee figures and 8 projectile figures. One figure is the chief figure. This figure should be clearly marked.

Playing the game.

   Both sides deploy their figures randomly on their baseline. There can only be four figures maximum         per square. (I usually scramble the figures and draw one at a time without looking, thereby having different combinations of Melee/ projectile groups)

   The first player moves up to 4 squares of figures, then resolves battle.  Second player takes his turn.

   Movement:  Both sides roll a dice to decide initiative for that turn. During a turn each side can only move four squares worth of figures. Figures can only move one square, either directly forward, sideways, or backwards; no diagonal moves.

Combat: Melee figures must be adjacent to the enemy to fight; projectile figures have a range of two. To shoot at a unit diagonal to it, the projectile figure counts the adjacent square as one, then the diagonal square as the second.  Each figure rolls one dice. If a 5 is rolled, one enemy figure must retreat two spaces. If a 6 is rolled, one figure is killed. (I have started counting a 4 or 5 roll as a retreat roll the last couple of games, to make a more fluid game.)

Battle: Although only four square of figures can be moved, ANY figure that can battle may do so. If an adjacent square is opened up through combat, the attacking side may advance a unit into the vacated square.   During the movement phase the moving side may move parts of the unit to other squares, but that movement counts as one square worth of movement. All combat should go in order of either left to right, or right to left.

Retreats and Kills:  If a figure is forced to retreat, it moves directly back towards its baseline. If that square is occupied by four figures, the figure is "Killed". If there is only square left, the figure retreats off the board.  If the enemy gets in the square behind an enemy unit, and the enemy have figures that have to retreat, the retreating figure or figures are killed.  If the leader figure is forced to retreat off the board or is killed, that army losses the battle. Once one side has lost 16 warriors, that side has lost the battle.

That's basically is the game. It is easy enough to make optional rules for each individual game. I have added cavalry, allowing for the figures to move 2 squares, but still only roll one dice, the idea being that early cavalry rode small horses and didn't have stirrups.  It is also easy enough that you could have a larger pool of melee and projectile figures, the idea being that by doing a "blind draw" figures, one side might end up with more projectile figures that the other.

Here are a couple ofphotos from a recent post. Instead of using individual figures, I used bases with multiple figures on each base. I did also add some optional rules, including having several stands of Elite Huscarls which got a bonus when in combat.