One Page Rules Rules.
Since recapturing my nerdom, I have been doing a solid amount of miniature painting, gaming and roleplay.
From a gaming perspective - 2022 was a bumper year. My stated hobby intention was to “play more games”. I finally managed sit down and play: Necromunda, Kill Team, Mordheim, Warhammer Quest, Cursed City, after seemingly years of staring at unused minis and rulebooks.
But one set of experiences has jumped out (prompted by the lovely lads over at the Middle Earth Crisis pod). It is One Page Rules.
The heavy hitters of the vampiric undead and stormcursed eternal wardens that have been driving the OPR Age of Fantasy madness at Shame HQ.
So what the hell are one page rules?
A miniature agnostic game system that lets you play with all your toys? Check.
A free app that helps you build army lists in 5 minutes? Check.
Rules that even total newbies can get the hang of in 10 – 20 mins? Check.
Shit. Just. Got. Real.
I love dungeon crawls, small scale skirmish, narrative driven tabletop roleplay.
However, sometimes you just want to line up a bunch of toys and bang them into each other without needing: 4 hours spare, a metric tonne of 150 page+ rulebooks, and the disposable cash equivalent to a reasonably priced car.
I have now played 7/8 games of OPR across multiple formats (Skirmish, Age of Fantasy) and I think it is great.
One of the first and resounding impressions is just how logical the rules are.
All actions are taken against a quality test role and defence against defence check. Even basic, core mechanisms like movement are simple and easy to enact (measure from the leading model, move everyone and then reconsolidate at the other end).
Where there are exceptions (+1 to hit) extra wounds etc, it is explained entirely and concisely in the app with a simple hover or click. It scales up and down simply and effectively. The rules for playing with 10 – 20 models are 90% of the rules for playing with 100+.
Of the OPR games I have played (largely over the Christmas break) the bulk of these games have been with people that have never tried miniature gaming before/or don’t play often. These games were relatively quick (under 2 hours), fun and required minimal rules checking.
The internal game balance is also exceptionally good. The lists I have built using the Army Forge Beta App (https://army-forge.onepagerules.com/), have created games that are close, fair and run to the last handful of minis.
I can see an immediate and not entirely unfair critique that the experience is too simple or streamlined. To this I would say that there are a) a bunch of narrative bolt-on rules and b) this lends itself to building your own narrative driven games to layer in the complexity.
Conclusion
OPR is such a solid addition to the arsenal of miniature games. I didn’t know I needed it but now it is in my life I can’t imagine not using it. Crucially, I can’t wait to use it to drive more one-shot gaming days/narrative events. Anything that fires the creative juices to want to host and run games is a win for me.
If you already have some toys and mates that are keen to try but have been put off by the rules hammer elements of the hobby. This is a no brainer.
