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In this episode of Tales & Tactics Rules as Written, we cover Fighting Formations: US 29th Infantry Division from GMT Games, designed by Chad Jensen and published in 2025 as a standalone entry in the long running Fighting Formations series. Operating at a scale of 75 metres per hex with turns representing approximately five minutes of real time, the game puts players in command of platoon, squad, crew, and vehicle level engagements as the 29th Infantry Division fights its way through France, Holland, and Germany.

This week on Beyond the Book, we go looking for the difference between bending a genre and breaking it. We get into why some blends are overloaded, with rules that make the two halves cost each other something, and why others are just a coat of paint over a system that would run identically without them. Occasionally the collision produces something that could not have existed any other way, and nobody can quite agree on why that one worked.

This week on Rules as Written, we crack open Shadowrun 4th edition and go looking into how it actually works. A game about people who sell off pieces of themselves to buy three seconds of being faster than everyone else. A setting that spent three decades insisting that magic, mega-corps and surgically wired reflexes all belong in the same rain slicked city, now in an edition that tried to make every bit of it run on one handful of dice.

In this episode of Tales & Tactics: Beyond the Book, we dig into how to start a new time period, setting, or subject in tabletop gaming, especially within miniature wargaming. We get into choosing models you actually enjoy working with, matching rules and scope to the kind of stories you want to tell. Managing time, money, space commitments, and reusing collections across multiple systems, all get explored. We range from Dark Age campaigns and WWII platoon games to RPGs, solo skirmish systems, and how to “tentpole” a local gaming community without burning yourself out.

In this week's episode of Rules as Written, we cover Close Quarters Battles: Waterloo from Lock 'n Load Publishing, a small-unit tactical wargame designed by Andrew Glenn that brings one of history's most investigated battles down to the ground level. Rather than placing players in the role of Wellington or Napoleon surveying the field from a command post, Close Quarters Battles zooms in on the desperate and ferocious fighting around the fortified farms of La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont. We discuss how the game's elegant rules, presented with exceptional clarity and backed by top notch production values, manage to make Napoleonic small-unit tactics like formations, morale, fatigue, command and control feel accessible and authentically weighted.

In this week's episode of Beyond the Book, we dig into the nasty bits: why a villain has to be genuinely vile before stopping them means anything, why a setting needs real shadows before it feels like a real place, how much ugliness a game can carry before the fun gives out, and why playing the monster at the table doesn't make you one away from it. Along the way we try to draw the line between darkness that gives a story its weight and darkness that's only there to shock. Because the uncomfortable truth is that the games we love are only as good as the things in them we hate.

In this week's episode of Rules as Written, we dig into Fairy Meat. In 2000, the publishers of Knights of the Dinner Table put out a wargame about fairies, the cute, glittery, storybook kind, with one twist: they've all become cannibals. The miniatures are life size, the battlefield is your kitchen table, a forest preserve, or the food court at the mall, and every battle runs on an ordinary deck of playing cards. It sounds like a joke, So why does it play like somebody meant it? How a deck of poker cards replaces every die, why fairies eat their fallen friends mid battle and what it does for them, and the rulebook that lists a fictional character as its co-creator. Come for the butterfly winged butchery, stay for the sneaky clever game hiding under the glitter and gore.

In this episode of Tales & Tactics Beyond the Book, we tackle a question that sits at the heart of every hobbyist’s collection. What actually ages a game? We explore whether it is the mechanics themselves that date a design, as newer systems offer more refined or efficient solutions to the same problems, or whether a game’s age is better measured by the moment its developer withdraws support, leaving rules questions unanswered and supplements unpublished. We also examine the powerful role a dedicated community plays in keeping a game alive long past any commercial lifespan, through house rules, fan supplements, active forums, and sheer collective enthusiasm. As games like Crossfire demonstrate, a design can remain vital decades after publication with no second edition in sight. Ultimately, we land on the conclusion that age in tabletop gaming is not an objective condition but a deeply personal one and whether a game has aged out is a question only you, the player, can answer for yourself.

In this episode of Tales & Tactics, our Rules as Written series covers Crossfire, the 1996 company level World War II miniatures game designed by Arty Conliffe. Born from a challenge issued at Historicon in 1995 to design a historical miniatures wargame without two features present in most rulesets (rulers and fixed game turns), Crossfire remains one of the most distinctive and quietly radical designs the hobby has ever produced. Rather than traditional turn based play, Crossfire plays with an initiative system where a player may order troops in any way across movement, fire, and rally actions in any order, continuing to do so until one of his actions fails. At this moment, initiative passes to the opponent. Units advance in realistic tactical bounds from terrain feature to terrain feature, with no arbitrary units of measurement, and everything that can be seen can be shot at which makes terrain selection and table density critical to the game’s function. Thirty years on, Crossfire feels less like a period piece and more like a design ahead of its time, asking deep questions about infantry command, suppression, and tactical momentum.

In this week's episode of Beyond the Book, we discuss the early introduction of the role playing hobby to Japan. With titles such as Traveller and Dungeons & Dragons being translated and even works of Tolkien being introduced in the 60's showcasing western fantasy to a new audience. The gamebook boom that taught a million readers how dice and stats work, the computer magazine commission that accidentally invented the actual play genre. It is a story about how a genre gets imported and about how much of what feels native was assembled by a handful of people who already knew each other.

In this week's episode of Rules as Written, we dig into Sword World 2.5's Power Table and its runaway criticals, its faction based combat, its firmly centralized GM authority, and party roles gated so tightly the rulebook explicitly closes the loopholes you might reach for. We also trace what survived from the 1989 original which turns out to be most of the arithmetic and almost none of the combat engine. Japan's best selling roleplaying game for thirty five years is a study in how much structure a system can impose while still calling itself welcoming.

In this Beyond the Book companion to our Repent! Ye Foolish Gods episode, we look at how roleplaying games and wargames borrow from each other, going both ways. First we ask whether you should bring miniatures to your RPG table. Models make positioning, line of sight, and area effects clear, cut down on rules arguments, and look great on the table. But they also cost time and money to collect and paint, they can slow play down, and they can make a loose, freeform game feel more rigid. Then we flip it around and spend the second half on adding RPG ideas to wargames and their campaigns. Using the ongoing warband progression from Repent! as our example, we talk about named characters who build up a history, injuries and losses that stick, earning experience and improving your fighters, and the story a group gains as it carries its scars from one battle to the next. We close on how a good campaign lets players go from just playing a ruleset to telling their own story with it.

In this episode of Rules as Written, we dig into Repent! Ye Foolish Gods, the 2026 skirmish game from Snarling Badger Studios by Adam Loper and Vincent Venturella, in which a four model warband of cursed and discarded mortals fights its way up the divine hierarchy with the goal of killing a god. We break down the roll under D12 engine, the Supremacy and Deficiency mechanic that drives most tactical decision making, and a warband construction process that pairs six Septs against six warrior archetypes with genuine roster legality constraints. We spend most of our time on the campaign layer, where an escalating Extolment score governs enemy density and gates access to harder content, and where a six tier enemy AI system carries the solo and co-op play that the game treats as its default mode. We follow the progression loop through raid generation, the injury and death table, and the experience economy, up to the three stage endgame ladder of Legendary Monster, God’s Vanquisher, and finally the god itself.

In this Beyond the Book discussion, we explore the role of crunch in tabletop gaming. We discuss why some of the hobby's most beloved games are also its most complex, what makes players embrace or reject heavy rulesets, and how designers balance realism, depth, accessibility, and player engagement. Whether you love lightweight narrative games or thousand page rulebooks, we tackle one of tabletop gaming's oldest debates: when are the rules worth the complexity, and when are they simply too much?

In This week's Rules as Written episode, we dig into BattleTech: A Time of War's detailed character creation, sprawling skill system, tactical combat, and tendency toward troupe style play. We explore a functional and ambitious RPG whose greatest strength and greatest weakness may be the same thing: its determination to provide rules for nearly everything. A Time of War sets out to let you play almost anyone in the Inner Sphere, from MechWarriors and mercenaries to spies, nobles, technicians, and traders. But in trying to model an entire universe while remaining compatible with the BattleTech tabletop wargame, does it become too complicated for its own good?