[MFM] About My Created Game: Miniature Field Manual

Today, I’d like to talk about my created game: Miniature Field Manual.

As the name suggests, Miniature Field Manual is a set of operational guidelines that help miniature soldiers understand how to act once they hit the battlefield. It includes things like knowing their strength, how to traverse the battlefield, how to attack and defend in their favor, how to take down enemies, and, in the unfortunate event that they fall, whether they can stand up and continue fighting, or sashay away from the battlefield...

Jokes aside, in short, this is a small-scale skirmish wargame. Players use their collected miniatures to form a squad and face off against another player's squad. The game is turn-based, where one player activates all their units in a turn, and then it’s the other player’s turn. It also introduces an activation point system, where each soldier must spend an activation point to perform two actions. These activation points are generated through Discipline Tests, which represent their morale.

The game also ditches the typical wargame format where the attack process is split into multiple steps (such as determining whether an attack hits and then whether it’s defended against). Instead, it combines the attack’s accuracy, number of hits, and damage into one metric, and the defender’s defense, distance, evasion, and cover into another. Both players then roll multiple dice at once, comparing the results to determine if the attack succeeds.

Compared to large-scale wargames, the rules of skirmish wargames are generally lighter, making them easier to create. There are many similar games available on the market, each with its own unique features. For many, this might just be "another skirmish wargame," but I believe MFM stands out for its high level of accessibility compared to other games in the same genre. As a simple game core, it can easily be adapted to various settings. For example, although the current core rules only cover physical melee, shooting, and defense, by adding just a few more sets of values, it can be smoothly applied to fantasy, sci-fi, or cyberpunk settings.

A player from the community who reviewed the early version of the game told me, “If this is a game people can learn the rules in ten minutes, then you’ve succeeded. The next challenge is how you get people to abandon other games and start playing yours.”

This was a huge encouragement for me because this rule set was originally designed with the goal of getting my beloved wife to play games with me. She also gave me a challenge: designing a game with rules that could fit on an A4 sheet of paper.

It troubled me for a long time. All the wargames I knew had movement rules that spanned over pages, and there was no way to fit everything into one A4 sheet unless the text was reduced to a tiny font. This dilemma lasted for almost half a year, until I came across the Quick Reference Guide rules of Turnip28. They managed to fit everything into a double-sided A4 sheet, and the art and writing, which added flavor to the setting, didn’t feel compromised. Of course, it omitted quite a few details, but it left a strong impression on me and allowed me to reconsider what elements were truly essential for a game, instead of simply continuing to rely on elements that had been considered "necessary" in the past. This was also the reason why the early versions of MFM were formatted as a trifold brochure.

I also discovered that my wife really loves rolling dice. She doesn’t necessarily make the best choice, but she wants to roll the most dice — as if there’s nothing more satisfying to her than rolling the highest value. So, “rolling a lot of dice” also became my top priority when designing the dice mechanic.

In the end, after going down a few detours, I adopted the simplest approach: comparing dice rolls. It’s the most intuitive method, where you use common D6 dice to compare values — the higher roll wins, and if the results are the same, you compare the second-highest roll, and so on, until a winner is determined or one player runs out of dice. The more powerful your unit is and the more favorable factors you have, the more dice you roll. Conversely, the more difficult the challenge and the more unfavorable factors you have, the more dice your opponent rolls. Not only is this intuitive, but it subtly adjusts the odds of success and prevents issues where, in some games, the target value becomes unreachable after stacking penalties, requiring special rules to address situations where a roll might exceed the maximum possible roll result.

The core of MFM is this simple. And because it’s so simple, it can be easily adjusted and applied to different settings.

I plan to make a series of gameplay videos soon. These will be real gameplay videos, but since the game is still in development, I might be tweaking the rules as I go. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to seeing you next time!