A campaign for 5 leagues, and easily used with 2nd edition.

A different campaign than dark woods, here you have a new and specific monster type, which has its own specific fighting styles and weapons. They also have a type of magic.

This campaign has stages. Each one is different, and harder than the last.

Its easy to lose this campaign, due to the calamity mechanic. You do get the chance to get a LOT of loot, as well as some interesting goblin treasure.

I think this is tougher than the dark woods, I would want a more experience band before heading here.

I nice expansion for 5 Leagues, and I find it quite compatible with the 2nd edition, with really nothing to change.

Basically what is different is the encounters tables, and the after battle loot and such.

You have "Fey" creatures, which some items affect more, and others don't affect at all. Hope you have the right things!!

Areas tend to be more dense, so there will be less ranged combat, more up close and personal stuff. There is only one village, that helps.

There are new (and strange) type of enemies, many not quite human or plain not at all human.

If you want a more "spooky" adventure, this is for you.

I bought the entire "Scum of the Earth" series, including the Demo. I wanted the Demo for my friend who will NEVER read a longer rule book. I decided to see what kind of game could be played right out of the Demo booklet.

After a quick and smooth read-through, I gathered a 2x2 foot scenery board, four small forest groupings, sme d6 and averaging dice and dusted off forty-two stands of 15mm American Civil War figures that had not seen daylight in ten years.

With the book close at hand, I diced for initiative, then started rolling for the variable moves of my three units of infantry, and one unit of light cavalry. (For the Demo, there is NO artillery. Nothing being in range, I started the same process for the other side.

Soon both forces were in range, and fire began. I used the Average Dice, having bought two pair half a century ago... Soon units were shaken, then breaking. This game will definately reward the commander who keeps a unit or two in reserve. In twenty minutes, six turns were complete, and a winner was decided based on casualties.

The game was fast, fun, and not determined by the strenght of a 'points list'. It had very much the feel of games I enjoyed when I was getting started long ago. This was a bare-bones game, and there are a lot of options available in the full set for when you are ready to deal with them.

I can think of no better way to introduce a newcomer to historical black powder gaming than this simple Demo set. You may gain an opponent for life.

I had the first edition, but never got around to playing it because I didn't really have any fantasy figures or terrain. By the time I got around to it, there was the second edition, which I'm really enjoying!

First, the game is solo or cooperative focused. This is great for me, because I don't get out much. Plus, solo games seem to make for better "stories", like D&D without a DM. The solo focus also means that the system is, I don't want to say "lite", but very straightforward, which is important when you're playing by yourself, and maybe trying to log the events of the "story" that unfolds while also trying to keep track of the turns and the modifiers. As such, there's not much to keep track of, and the modifiers are few, but there are still important tactical decisions to make.

The material in the books doesn't establish a setting per se, but it does hint at one through the types of characters, the backgrounds, the events and the encounters. So, it's evocative, but flexible. Also there are so many cool things that can happen. "The Palid Wanderer" floats through your battlefield. A "Haunted Stone" terrifies all who approach. The Red Moon portends bloodshed! Cool! The main campaign structure is set around eliminating the various threats to the village you're visiting, but there are also special events, some of which serve as mini-campaigns within the overall campaign, like the Sickness Below (rat-men!) and Rumors of Treasure (treasure hunt!) and others.

And of course, your characters can gain experience and skills, and find unique treaures. Or sometimes they die in glorioius battle.

So, in a nutshell, the system is fast and fun, and the options and tables in the book offer exciting and atmospheric things to encounter (and fight). I lost a Hero and a Follower in my first encounter, trying to clear out a band of raving fanatics camped outside of an old church, but I'm eager to bind my wounds and get back out there. Evil will not take this village today! :)

Interesting system , that I enjoyed reading . This system is composed of character creation, system rules and solo rules/tools. It expands the dice pool system I enjoyed for years playing Tunnels and Trolls fifth ed. With these rules you can build a sandbox world in any genre you choose . Creating foes and npcs, monsters appears to be easy with these rules. Simple rules for magic, super powers etc. You will need to use your imagination with this game , but thats not a bad thing , after all its good mental exercise and creativity, its the way played back in the day . I purchased this game on sale , and im happy with the purchase.

The "Hammer" series of games share many mechanics that make the game system accesable to even new players. They are written in an easy to follow prgression that allows you to begin with a few infantry, then add a few more assets each game, until you are immersed in the system. Re-basing your figures is NOT a requirement(thank the Powers that Be). A 3x3 foot table with some dense terrain can give a most satisfactory game in a reasonable amount of time, using only a few squads per side....A good example would be two or three squads(of two stands) on each side, searching for each other in the hedgerows.

The equipment listed covers a good variety of the US, UK, USSR, and German inventory from 1940-45. Ivan tells me that Poland is going to be added soon, and other forces, such as Italy and France can be worked out using similar vehicles from the existing lists.....For exzmple, an Italian M13/39 is very close to a Russian T26. An Italian 47mm AT gun is about equal to a German 50mm....You get the idea.

The Finns can be added by getting the separate set "Winter Hammer".

Highly recommended for face-to-face gamers ready to enjoy a game without bogging dowm in rules, or solo gamers with limited time.

Hi all,

I am doing RPG/Wargame product overviews on my podcast, "Live from Pellam's Wasteland," and I just did an episode on Not Just a Brush War. Here it is: https://anchor.fm/pellamswasteland/episodes/11-Overview-Not-Just-a-Brush-War-by-Nordic-Weasel-Games-e4561e The overview basically just goes over what's in the pdf, which is mostly a list of the random tables that are included and how they can be used to develop a random nation and military and then running an actual brush war campaign.

If you're not interested in listening to the overview, I can tell you that I think this is a very cool product that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Thanks,

Arlen Walker

Five parsecs it is the best rpg light skirmish solo system you could find anywhere , all the cores are superb well written and easy to play. The best expansion it is the planetary  generator. Wild animals , carnivourous plants !!! Simply  Great !! Every cores it is a new voyage in the unknown

Simple and fun rules for Fantasy battles, with a handful of miniatures on a small playing space (about 60 miniatures and a 60x60cm board with some terrain features are enough). Units are just 6 figures for infantry, 1 figure for characters, heroes and generals, 3 figures for mounted; works well with 28mm single based miniatures, and with multibased figures (1 base = 1 figure in the rules) but on a larger table, I think. Includes rules for war engines, monsters, personalities, unit special traits, and interesting features like unit formations, reactions and combined attacks. There are not rules for back / side attacks (that is a bit strange in my opinion) but these can easily worked out, same for Magic that in the rules are just a shooting ability. IGOUGO turn sequence, good solo playability, due to simplicity and random movement distance, good for campaign games, could even be used for historical (dark age / medieval). I wish that the beta version will become a full version one day. PS I just would have liked a quick reference sheet, even if the rules are so simple.

I'm impressed with this title. The core system is elegant and easy to understand but flexible and open to tweaking by the players which is nice. A lot of current rule systems are aimed at tournament gaming and it is nice to have a game I can play casually with my friends but is still tactically deep. The author has included a lot of bonus material as well: common house rules for the game, althernate turn sequences, and random tables to help with pickup games. It is a good tool box game that reminds me of a lot of classic games from the 80s and early nineties. I can see using this for some personal projects.

There are some negatives. The book seems to be a libreoffice writer file saved as a PDF. Functional, but people who want lots of artwork and well laid out pages will be disappoined. Worse, the author has elected to put many of the alternate ways the game can be played in line with the base rules. So the section describing the activation system discusses multiple activation systems before moving on to the movement section. I would have ranther seen the alternate ways to play the game in their own section later in the book. It took me a few re-reads to get the base system down because I kept pulling in elements of the alternate systems without realizing it.

Those are minor complaints and the game is so good I'm still giving it five stars. I hope this game represents a larger movement in the industry to return to creative and fun games over needlessly complex games that are better at selling miniatures then they are fun to play.

SUMMARY (based on one full test-game): A very nice ruleset. Arguably an ideal introduction to this scale of wargaming, and likely also a safe bet for more experienced large-scale gamers who want a faster, more streamlined experience. The game has some but not too much book-keeping (though see my caveat below). Play is fluid, tactics are important, reaction fire and suppression are important and consequential. You can play a brigade-level engagement in an hour or two.

SOME POSITIVE IMPRESSIONS:

• the game is just abstract enough to keep play fast. It focuses on your perspective as the Brigade Commander, NOT the sum of all command perspectives from the platoon level up. Because of this, you have a fairly abstract classification of units - for the most part, for example, “infantry is infantry.” Yet a clever “unit attachments” element in the rules also allows you more granularity to distinguish units with different capabilities. The attachment system is quite flexible; I used it to good effect for the sci-fi elements in our (Warhammer 40k-themed) test battle. Space Marines actually felt like Space Marines, without being overpowered...
• on that note, the game is quite playable as written, but also quite open to tweaking, hacking, and flexibility - without breaking the game.
• fluidity of play: units advance - but sometimes get halted or pushed back by fire. Tactics, reaction fire, suppression, all felt very important. This is not a game for units to slowly add up their mounting casualties while they roll inexorably across the battlefield. This is a game where tactics and planning matter, but ‘no plan will survive contact with the enemy’ - probably - and you may find yourself scrambling to stop, or to exploit, a sudden hole in the lines or enemy breakthrough...

A FEW CRITIQUES, AND A FEW TWEAKS:

• there are some occasional typos and ambiguities in the rules. These never presented a major problem. Becoming more familiar with the rules may take care of much of this ambiguity for me. Second, the author is highly active online and helpfully responsive to emails with rules questions, etc.
• the Quick Reference Sheets for the game are included but they do not provide quite enough detail, at least not for a first time playing the game. I printed off some extra content (the more detailed description of firing results) and I may create my own, more detailed QRS for future games.
• for our first game, at least, I felt that the possible unit statuses inflicted by Shock dice were one too many (rolling a 1 on a Shock die will inflict a different Status based on whether the target was in covering terrain or not). Long-term, familiarity with the game may let me exploit the nuanced added by the full option, but for now, I just treated all Shock dice “1s” the same. Not surprisingly, this did nothing to ruin my enjoyment of the game, kept things even faster, and worked fine.

IF YOU ALREADY PLAY GAMES IN 2-10MM SCALES: …then I’d suggest this if you want a more streamlined, faster way to play large battles.

IF YOU ARE NEW TO THIS SCALE OF GAMING: …then you should know that it isn’t a difficult level to break into. Armies generally can be acquired more cheaply than at other scales. For our test-battle, I just made up my own top-down unit stands on the computer and printed them off onto foam core bases. Worked fine. The rules offer a really nice introduction and a way to play battles with, say, 15 companies to a side.

IF YOU PLAY SCI-FI WARGAMES: …these rules are written for modern, ‘real-world’ wargaming, but they are not difficult to modify for sci-fi play (as noted above, my test-battle used a 40k setting). The attachments system offers a great way to add unit differentiation. 5Core is a set of rules that run from the skirmish up to brigade level; the 5Core Company Commander level rules have an inexpensive expansion called “5Core Company Commander in Spaaace…” which is not essential but has some ideas that can be modified and carried up to brigade level.

OVERALL: a fun fast game where tactics still matter. I look forward to playing again.

I’m very pleased with this purchase. No Stars in Sight (NSIS) offers tactical, fun squad-to-platoon level gameplay that isn’t likely to fry your brain (with some simple tweaks it could work for somewhat abstract company level engagements too). These comments are based on my experiences after buying the .pdf, skimming the rules for a few days, and playing one test game with my kids. The game was great fun, tactical, and interesting, but not brain-frying.

Much has been made of the “bank robbery shootout” scene in the movie Heist, a scene that features outnumbered gunmen using brute force, automatic fire, judicious use of cover, and coordinated movement to great effect. Honestly, compared to most of the skirmish/squad-level rulesets I’ve played before, NSIS offers gameplay that feels a bit like that movie scene! Cover is really important; reaction fire and suppression matter a lot but are handled in a very elegant, easy way by the rules; coordination between squads, or at least between members of the same squad, is really critical for making headway across the battlefield. Casualties tend to accumulate more slowly than many war gamers will be accustomed to - yet something interesting is always happening. Go back and watch that Heat shootout scene again, or others like it; note the enormous amounts of lead tossed around in between every actual casualty. In the same way, NSIS portrays sci-fi gunfights where huge amounts of fire are being tossed back and forth, but usually this leads to suppression, pinning, or delayed movement. Yet the game doesn’t feel static.

I’m currently using this with 40k sci-fi minis for our gaming. I found that the simple, minimal-fuss rules worked really well. In our test-battle, a squad of elite security troopers (Imperial Guard, but running as ‘Professionals’ in NSIS terms) were supported by two small fire-teams of Space Marines (also professionals, but we further gave them an automatic cover save in addition to their assault armor even when they weren’t in cover). They faced off against 3 squads of Trained criminals and cultists blocking their exit from a raided compound. The engagement developed into separate firefights for control of key alleyways; eventually, coordination of supporting fire between units, and some calculated risks that got key troops around corners into flanking positions, allowed the 'good guys' to pin the bad guys and then clean their clocks in short-range assaults. Random dice rolls mattered, of course, but it really felt like common-sense squad tactics, use of cover, and leveraging troop quality over multiple turns really paid off. In the end, the bad guys got pushed back into a crossfire and then outflanked, and that was it. I was really pleased with how the fight went. Professionals really felt like better troops than Trained adversaries; and our proxy marines felt quite powerful, but still just vulnerable enough that they couldn’t take enemy action too lightly. Long-term, I intend to use fairly simple rules for Space Marines, and reserve the game’s Powered Armor advanced rules for Terminators and Dreadnoughts. Just the simple core rules already feel pretty effective for my “vanilla 40k” tastes.

I do have two critiques to offer, but they are pretty minor. First, the core rules are very simple and easy to ‘get.’ But the many special rules and exceptions for more advanced unit types will probably stack up quickly in a large game or a game with quite diverse troop-types. The rules recognize this and encourage players to start small and simple, which is quite reasonable advice. I’m pleased to say that our test battle didn’t involve particularly diverse elements, but it still felt challenging and interesting. The rules summary ‘cheat sheet’ at the back of the back is quite helpful, but I also found it useful to print off my own ‘cheat-sheet’ showing each squad’s basic information (including Firepower level) and any special rules that applied to them. Second, I found the morale rules to be the most complex part of the game. Mind you, they aren’t actually terribly complex, this is just to say that I found them more complex than other parts of the game. Most of the game involves hardly any math (one of the reasons I reached for NSIS over the Squad Hammer rules, which appear to rely more on adding up to-hit bonuses). But when a squad takes enemy fire, you are supposed to count up quickly how many pins they received, how many casualties are also weighing down the squad too, and then roll under the combined total or fall back a certain distance away from the enemy fire. Not that complicated, to be sure, but you have to do this so often (when a squad takes fire) that the very small amount of math involved does translate into small-but-frequent math. As time goes on, I think I might tweak this very simply into a more streamlined way to test and apply morale/fall-back procedures, but I don’t think doing so is likely to change the feel of the game very much. At any rate, with more experience under my belt, even the morale rules as written might feel more comfortable.

All in all I highly recommend NSIS if you are looking for a sci-fi squad to platoon-level game that emphasizes real-life tactics over clunky rules. I hear one can also use the same mechanics for a slightly larger (small company) level engagement by making each “figure” a fire team or squad in a platoon. If the ruleset sounds appealing but you aren’t looking for sci-fi, then look at No End in Sight, the historical version. Finally, if you do get this ruleset, also pick up the 2015 Nordic Weasel Grab-Bag .pdf (Pay What You Want, I believe) which has a few extra special rules options and ideas (I may try using some of those rules to further test out Space Marine options). Two thumbs up!

This is a great little system and is worth a try for anyone. I purchased this in hopes of finding a simple game for all of the tons and tons of Star Wars minis I've never used and I wasn't disappointed. It turns out that it works fantastic for Star Wars and our group had a lot of fun with it. You know it's good when you have 7 veteran gamers try out something new and they all like it. (We all know how hard it is to please veteran gamers!) I knew we were onto something 5 minutes into our test run when one of the guys said "holy cow this game moves fast." This basic version doesn't have much chrome, but that's a good thing to get a feel for how the mechanics work. The author has versions of these rules that can be used for various historical periods and it looks like he added just a little bit of the chrome there but I have a hunch that you can pick and choose how much or how little of that chrome to use. Pick up this basic version and get hooked on the simple mechanics and you'll probably do like I did and pick up the others too. I'll be giving the Russo-Finnish Winter War 1939 version a shot next.

This won't be the ruleset to replace all of my other rules 100% of the time. However, this is about to become my go-to set of rules for when we don't want to spend 4 hours on a hard core game or when I want to run something without doing much prep work. This gets two thumbs up from me!

I own many of the "Hammer" products. It's a fun and easy game system to learn. And this Core version is the cleanest version to date. Even if you own some of the other Hammer products, I'd still recommned it.

If you're new to Squad Hammer: At first glance, it might seem simplistic, but there is a fair amount of subtilty. You need to soften up an enemy unit in cover, but long range shooting probably won't shift it out of a defended position -- you'll need to get up close and personal for that. in other words, the rules encourage realistic tactics without a massive amount of rules. A combination which many/most rules are not able to achieve.

I also want to make special mention of the layout and design. Nordic Weasel has in the past had fairly simple layouts for their products (which I actually appreciated since I like to print out my pdf's). However, this product sees a much slicker presentation with photos illustrating the rules and a very nice quick-reference sheet. But it won't kill you printer cartridge either.

Well worth the suggested pay-what-you-want price. Looking forward to seeing what Nordic Weasel does with the Squad Hammer system!

First, I should point out that I provided some playtest feedback and some photographs for the game, but I did buy my own copy.

With that out of the way, I really like "Renegade Scout". The problem is that it's hard to say exactly why.

I mean, it's a solid set of rules that are comprehensive and easy to understand, so that's good. It has sort of an "old-school" feel, but cleaned up and engergized with some modern sensibilities, so it feels familiar and comfortable but not burdensome or outdated. And I can't think of anything that I would want from the game that it doesn't cover. Vehicles, robots, sneaking, campaigns, character advancement, helpful and inspiring random tables, "off map support", falling, interrogation, reinforcements, and just a ton more. Maybe I'm just uptight, but that thoroughness really feels good.

Oh! And the magic/psychic powers! They're fun and semi-random, with cool names and effects. What I like in particular is that some powers are persistent, like "Float the Wind" which lets the caster hover over terrain without penalty (and without having to actually "cast" the effect), and some powers are maybe a little more powerful or desireable than others (but not too much). What I like about that is that your caster can, over several campaign games, "collect" the spells that they want, and when you finally roll up "Mind Plague" (or whatever you're hoping for), it's an exciting event. Also, the table of critical failures for powers has the possibility of warping your caster and any other figures and terrain nearby into the void, never to be seen again. It's not likely, but man, that would be something to remember!

On a less bonkers note, I also like the "sheltering" rule. It basically lets your units "hide" as they move around the board, and makes terrain important for more than just a defense bonus. Basically, your sheltering units can't be shot at if they are sheltering, unless your opponent can pass a "spotting" roll, which is based on the distance between the units. It's all very elegant and tactical, and the extra die rolls, when necessary, add to the texture of the game and aren't a burden (IMO).

So, those are some great things, but that still doesn't really explain how much I like this game. I think, in the end, it's just that when I've played, I've really felt engaged and had fun. Hooray, fun!

If you're interested, here are a couple examples of my fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eSlETsQ-fs&list=PLYUGDcghM-GWjAYDZPakeJzmQF4bfzGq9

https://redplayerone.blogspot.com/2018/11/renegade-scout-prydians-vs-maligs-at.html