Hearts of Battle

This supplemental game is meant as a fun and tactical way to play out mass combat encounters in fantasy tabletop adventure games. Many games can produce large wandering monster encounters during wilderness travel, such as OD&D (1974), Expert Dungeons & Dragons,  and their various modern retroclones. A wandering company of bandits or an undead horde of skeletons, for instance, could materialize during play, presenting a big challenge. The players may even be prepared for such a fight, with a company of mercenaries or followers in their retinue. How then would be best to play out this battle at the table? 

Instead of trying to deploy a traditional wargame approach that would require lots of miniatures and a large table of terrain which may take much time to set up and even longer to play the battle out, this system is designed like a simple hex and counter wargame, one that can be set up quickly and without much planning ahead. Further, this game tries to hold on to some of the tactical play and granular decision making of wargames—the meat, if you will. This is for those groups that don’t just want mass combat to be handwaved, or handled completely abstractly by merely chucking handfuls of dice. In lieu of dice, the entire battle is resolved using only a standard deck of playing cards, some counters, and a hexagonal grid battle map. To march your company of adventurers and followers to victory, you’ll need more than mere luck; careful planning and guile are also needed to win the day!

Everything needed to print and play is available to download here except deck of playing cards will be necessary.