What is Small Wars
Small Wars Historical & Fantasy is a tabletop wargame system designed to provide a standardised core ruleset for skirmish-scale battles across historical and fantasy settings, set prior to the widespread use of firearms. Small Wars enables players to quickly get models on the board and start playing with minimal preparation. The system serves as a flexible toolkit for creativity and experimentation. It offers a robust framework for building custom units, contingents, armies, and scenarios—supporting everything from historical reenactment to fantasy conflicts.
What You’ll Need to Play
To play Small Wars, you'll need a few basic tools:
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A set of polyhedral dice for each player: D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and D20.
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A flat playing surface, ideally 3×3 or 3×4 feet—a standard kitchen or dining table works perfectly.
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A selection of miniatures to represent your units. These can be historical, fantasy,or any models that you have available or that suit your setting.
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A measuring tape marked in inches for movement, ranges, and area of influence.
The Core rules can be purchased here
Why Small Wars?
As tabletop gamers and miniature collectors, we often find ourselves surrounded by amazing models from countless settings, systems, board games and 3d prints, yet without a consistent way to use them. Small Wars solves this problem. Players are encouraged to use miniatures from any source, regardless of origin. Whether they're from another game system, standalone sculpts, or custom 3D prints, if you have it, you can play with it. The system's custom unit and army building tools are designed to bring flexibility and life to long-neglected miniatures, allowing players to field whatever inspires them be it historical or fantasy.
In each battle, players field a team of units called a Contingent which is led by an Officer. Players roll for initiative, spend Action Points to perform actions, engage in combat, and test morale. Games can be played as straightforward deathmatches or as objective-driven scenarios. The game uses standard polyhedral dice (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20), which are widely available and familiar to most roleplaying and wargaming communities.
Games are fast-paced, typically lasting under an hour. The streamlined rules keep complexity low while preserving tactical depth, letting players focus on flanking, maneuvering, and timing without sacrificing fairness, balance, or historical and fantasy flavour.
The core system covers Ancient, Medieval and Fantasy warfare—infantry, cavalry, ranged combat, morale, and tactical movement. Advanced rules add historical elements like chariots and elephants, or fantasy features such as spells , mythical creatures (Warbeasts) and a variety of alternate game modes.
Small Wars then follows a modular design. Magic, War Machines, Beasts of War, and alternate game modes are optional features that let players tailor the experience to their preferred theme and level of complexity.
Evolving Development
Small wars has been designed with Modular Rules allowing players to enhance the game to their required complexity but also with a modular design ethos. After purchasing the core rules all other support material is provided to players at no extra cost. The intention of this is to allow periodic updates to the game following community enagement to improve and expand it. Small wars aims to develop and expand over time introducing new optional advanced rules, abilities, game styles, etc,