BtB: The Nasty Bits

In this episode of Tales & Tactics Beyond the Book, we explore a question that sits at the core of tabletop design. Where should a designer place statistical prominence, in the warrior or in the weapon? We begin in wargaming, looking at how the scale of a battle shapes this decision. At the skirmish level, the individual soldier and their kit can be the focus, while at larger scales the training, morale, and cohesion of a unit often matter more than any single piece of wargear. From there we turn to roleplaying games and the very different design philosophies behind equipment first systems, where a character's power comes largely from what they carry, versus systems built around inherent abilities, class features, and innate talents. We discuss how each approach changes the feel of play, from the excitement of acquiring a legendary item to the question of whether a hero is still a hero once their gear is taken away.

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.