I wanted to introduce my son to the fun and thinking of strategy games like Warhammer 40K, but without having to enter into all of the precious and ridiculous painting and babying of figurines that goes into those games, so we collaborated on a set of rules that we could easily agree upon.

The point of this exercise is to not have to buy a bunch of shit to have a good time, and to bang out some general principles that are flexible enough to stamp out in pretty much any scenarios.

For the board, tape out a 1ft grid. Getting the kids involved in the board setup is awesome, they love flattening the tape and running the grids. We did go through rather a lot of tape setting this up, perhaps there’s a more economical thing to do here (but I didn’t care for the sake of prototyping and having a good time with the kids).

For each tank, write your initials and boxes for the health points.

Turns alternate, starting with the youngest.

In a turn:

1. Roll 1d6 to determine the number of action points you can use in a given turn.
2. Pick a tank to move during this turn.
3. Burn action points
   1. Moving 1 square costs 1 action point.
   2. Rotating 90º costs 1 action point.
   3. Shooting costs 1 action point.
      1. Tanks can shoot across 1 empty square^[1]This is “range of 1”, which is nice, and leaves room for us to implement infantry and artillery and such..
      2. Roll 1d6:
         1. 1-3: miss
         2. 4-6: hit
4. Tanks have 4 health points, once all 4 boxes are colored in//health points burnt, remove that tank from the game board.

Win conditions: knock out all the opponent’s tanks.

Thoughts for next time:

• Formalize “max range”
  Something along the lines of “roll 1d6, subtract the number of empty squares between the shooter and target from the roll”.
• Formalize “speed”
  I think we’ll do something like “moving costs n action points” to model different units moving at different speeds. Infantry movements cost 2 action points and tanks cost 1. Mega-tanks (something my son is hell-bent on playing) will probably move about as slow as infantry or even slower, but have more health points.