Rules for the Common Man

I've recently been reading the AK47 Republic and Battles in the Age of War sets of miniatures wargames rules from the Rules for the Common Man range sold by Peter Pig miniatures. This won't be a full review given that I haven't yet managed to play with either set yet, but I have been able to at least give them a read through. AK47 Republic is the old version rather than the new AK47 Reloaded, but I am impressed enough to look at getting the new version.

There are a couple of common factors in the rules which is not surprising given that they are from the same company and I presume the same authors though no actual names are credited. Both use normal movement rather than the grid based system that some of their other sets use, for example Poor Bloody Infantry the WWII set.

There is an extensive pre-battle section that affects which player is the attacker and other things like the quality and availability of each player's troops and the terrain layout. These are dealt with differently in AK47 Republic and Battles in the Age of War as AK47 requires a player to commit 25 to 90 of the 500 points allowed to build their army to the pre-battle section with the higher scoring player becoming the attacker. One odd factor is that the attacker will have less points for their units on table, but there are possible results from the flow charts used for pre-game determination that may give them additional units or improve their unit quality to help balance out the game. Each stage on the flow chart gives a number of six sided dice that must be rolled and the total deducted from the pre-battle point allocation - so a player that has committed a large number of points will usualy be able to get further down the flowchart than one who has only put in a minimum.

Battles in the Age of War gives each player 60 Koku, six sided dice, to use in the pre-game section. The first thing that they dice off for is attacker status committing between 10-25 dice to this category. There are a further 8 categories that they can commit a further 1-9 dice to each of that affect their armies. The defender has a set of adjustments to their forces based on die rolls that make part of their forces absent or appearing late. As the two players will normally have equal points values for their forces this is useful in balancing out the game.

There will be a lot more to come about these in later posts.