Unheroic Samurai

These are rules for playing a wargame with toy soldiers. It is intended for several players – say 4 or more. Players control significant leaders – the key samurai of a clan, who in turn have contingents of fighters under them. These brave samurai find themselves opposed by hordes of undead horrors – the Oyoma.

Why 'One Brain Cell'? Well, many sets of wargame rules these days are horrendously complicated, with thick rule books to read, dozens of additional books to get (at unreasonable expense) and exceptionally complicated rule mechanisms that take ages to work out.

My brain is too simple for this, so I tend to write rules that only require a single brain cell to use and understand. This tends to make games easy to learn and play, and, amazingly, are just as much fun as the dense and complicated game rules for which you have to pay a fortune. Odd, isn't it?

– Unheroic Samurai introduction

Designer: Jim Wallman
Year Published: 2012
Status: In Print
Contents: Available online (12-page PDF)
Scale: The rules are written with 25mm-28mm scale figures in mind – but there is no reason why they can’t be adjusted for other figure scales – or even played with cardboard figures or counters depending on the sort of resources you have at your disposal.
– Unheroic Samurai page 3
Basing: To make things easy, we mount groups of figures on bases – each of these groups being treated as an indivisible element of followers.

If you don’t want to mount your figures on bases, you can just as easily move them around in clumps of separate figures – but you’ll obviously find it takes a little longer to play the game as you'll be moving the figures individually.

– Unheroic Samurai page 3