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Dominant Species

Once in a while, wargames publisher GMT decides to zig when everyone else zags, and prints a game that doesn’t fit their usual line-up. They did it years ago with titles like Winds of Plunder and Conquest of Paradise, and more recently with the cute Leaping Lemmings. This time around, GMT takes out the big guns: acclaimed wargame designer Chad Jensen (of Combat Commander fame), one of the biggest boxes and boards ever to roll off their assembly line, and a mammoth leap back in time to present us with Dominant Species, an evolutionary battle that’s roughly 90,000 years old. (Talk about a different breed of conflict simulation!)

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Song of Blades and Heroes

This small but perfectly formed set of miniatures rules is currently taking the wargaming world by storm. Unlike the hefty £40 Warhammer hardback, Ganesha Games’ Song of Blades & Heroes (SoBaH) can be ordered very cheaply in PDF format or from Lulu.com if you want to save your printer cartridges.

SoBaH sets out to be a set of generic fantasy skirmish rules. There is no setting per se – it could as easily be used for skirmishing in Middle Earth as Greyhawk. The point is you can get a decent game in under two hours, they are an easy set to learn and to teach, and you don’t need to shell out £150 on expensive miniatures to build an army. A good-sized SoBaH warband weighs in at 300 points, and can consist of as little as four of five figures, though an average warband will have between eight and 12 miniatures.

This shows how easy it is to get into SoBaH. The game can be used with either 15mm or 25mm figures, and at 15mm only needs a 2’ by 2’ area, so those with space constraints may want to give this attention.

SoBaH also embraces a number of other interesting design assumptions.

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