One of my favorites for miniature skirmishing with small warbands is Song of Blades and Heroes. You can get the pdf for eight dollars, use any figures you want, you'll only need about a dozen. A battle plays to completion in an hour or less. The rules are well written and you can see tons of videos of people playing it on youtube. Published by Ganesha Games: https://www.ganeshagames.net/index.php?cPath=1&osCsid=delc6ava1h9eq55vhk08q6rk1j

They have quite a few games for different genres that use some version of those basic mechanics.

Check out The Doomed, from Osprey.

Play rules can be explained in five minutes. No measuring. One stat. Simple, easy, fun.

40K-ish-but-not-quite setting, fight weird monstrosities from the book or that you cobble together from stuff you have already. Five to eight figures per player, the monster is run with behavior rules (I'm not calling it AI).

Quote from: weirdguy564 on November 02, 2023, 09:46:08 PM
Here is a guy who wrote a bunch of games, including some funny ones. The one about fighting aliens using only the state of New Jersey stands out.

http://www.cke1st.com/m_games1.htm

Ha, thanks for the link! Having lived in NJ for a time, I find this hilarious!

Quote from: Baron on December 05, 2023, 01:49:29 AM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on November 02, 2023, 09:46:08 PM
Here is a guy who wrote a bunch of games, including some funny ones. The one about fighting aliens using only the state of New Jersey stands out.

http://www.cke1st.com/m_games1.htm

Ha, thanks for the link! Having lived in NJ for a time, I find this hilarious!

Beware the sneaky sneaks, the Hopat Cong, or our fearless leader, Bruce Springsteen.

I'll say this.  I'll never play Warhammer or Warhammer 40K on the tabletop.  Too expensive, and too many rules.

But. 

One Page Rules fixes all that.  I can even figure out the rules in 10 minutes.  That counts a lot for me.

https://www.onepagerules.com/

I also think 3D printing is the way to go.  I am biased as I can make my own 3D models, and own a resin printer now.  I just need the free time to make stuff now.

I just stumbled across this yesterday. Bill Owen, the co-founder of Judges Guild who cashed out in 1978, has a site now with some inexpensive wargames. So far he has Tractics and its simpler predecessor Fast Rules, but I understand he plans to offer more. Site here: https://www.combatrules.com/

Mechs and warships?

From the same guy who did Gamma Wolves (which is really Salvage Crew: Star Mogul with very expensive minis), Steel Rift is even simpler than Alpha Strike, plays in 45 minutes on a 4 x 4 table.  All mechanics, no lore (but tons of support for making up your own lore and supporting it with mechanics, which more games need to do).

The Other Alpha Strike, CAV: Strike Operations is currently in the process of rebranding to CAV: Armored Might and it's a bit of a mess right now but the original CAV:SO rules are freely available (and free).

You didn't specify era but Osprey has some good historical quick-play naval games: Poseidon's Warriors (Greek trireme) and Fighting Sail (Age of Sail).

The advantage of all of these is they're quick to learn, quick to play, and minis agnostic, even if they have their own line.

Quote from: rkhigdon on October 30, 2023, 10:32:23 AM
If you're in to Warhammer style competitive games, with a simpler and better balanced system you could try One Page Rules.  The base game is free, with the Advanced versions being available for cheap.

There's a lot of good skirmish games available on Wargame Vault these days.  With Space Weirdos/Sword Weirdos, Planet 28, Space Station Zero, and most of the stuff from Wiley games and Nordic Weasel being particular favorites.

Sorry, RKhigdon. 

I go and make a post about One Page Rules and didn't even notice you had already done so.   My bad. 

Planet 28 is really fantastic. It reminds me of a slimmer, but easier Rogue Trader. If you like kitbashing you can really get your freak on with some of the crazy crap you can come up with for figures and scenarios.

Here is another group of simple war game rules.  The one I like the most is the Portable Pre-Dreadnought warship rules. 

I often think BattleTech spaceships are closest to pre-Dreadnoughts in their use and armament.  Lots of guns, but few turrets.

http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~warden/portable_wargame/downloads.html

The other war games I know very little about.  I've had the pre-Dreadnought game for a while now, but just found the homepage with the rest of them a few days ago.  I haven't had a chance to read them all. 

task force games 'StarFire'  and 'StarFire2', are easy fun games to play.
these are cheap pdfs on drivethrurpg

Star Fleet Battles Cadet Version(free to download and play) is fairly easy.  But beware the SFB wormhole, as the system is quite deep.

'Grand Fleets' on dtrpg is a great pre-dreadnaught naval game

finally Walter Moore games has 'Modern Armor' and 'Armored Fist', which is like a modern minis version of MBT and Squad Leader.

Late as always on this topic... but as an old wargamer who has been pulling out all the stops for trying to get ANYONE to still play any old wargame
that isn't Kingmaker with middling success.  But middling success is still something.

Any of the old Classics, Tactics, Tactics II, the Russian Campaign, Waterloo, Gettysburg are still fairly easy and cheap to find.  Almost ANY old SPI game
works very well for an introduction into the hobby.  Strategy and Tactics still has a game per issue, though the quality of their games vary wildly, older
issues tend to be more solid, in a general sense.  I can still find the Against the Odds Gazette has a game built around the theme of that particular
issue and I have, so far, enjoyed pretty much all of them.  The Folio Game series is pretty good for that as well, though i'd rather play the old SPI
Folio games so many of them are based on.  Though that's nostalgia for the ancient 4-color map and simple NATO counters speaking.

+1 for One Page Rules. Fun game, simple, free. Advanced version is cheap and adds quite a bit to the game, and it has a very active online community, and because it's so simple and uses a setting that a lot of people basically already have models for, it's pretty easy to get buy in locally.

Something that I've been looking to get to the table, the youtuber Tabletop Minions helped with a game Tanks or some other generic name in a Zine caller Snarl where each player has just one sherman tank model. That would be good for getting new players, since it's easy to bring an extra sherman and then point them to where they can buy one for like 20 cheetos. Also supports a frankly absurd number of players.

Found another weird little game I thought I would share. 

C.O.R.E. Mech Warfare.

https://thenthlevel.com/our-games/c-o-r-e-mech-warfare/

The demo rules are free.  In fact the only real difference between the full rules and demo rules is what page the PDF ends at.  The demo rules cut off the parts for mech building and stats for infantry, tanks, and helicopter gunships.  The actual combat rules are identical, otherwise. 

The suggested playing piece?  1/144 scale plastic model robots from Japan.  Mobile Suit Gundams.  Or Gunpla as they're known.  Or anything else you want, but it is implied that this game was meant to be a ground based Gundam tabletop wargame.  I find it a bit odd as the game's art is nothing like Gundam.  I think their art is AI-generated generic mechs that would look more like BattleTech mechs.

It isn't a large game.  The rulebook is only 48 pages long, which includes custom mech design rules.

The game is fairly simple.  The easiest way to describe it is BattleTech mixed with Warhammer.  Instead of generating heat that is tallied up at the end of a turn, this game uses power generated at the start of a turn and uses it up.  Shooting is a dice pool using a bunch of 1D6's.  Each dice that rolls at or above a target number from 3-7 (rolling a six, and picking it up and re-rolling another six is a "7") is a hit and does 1 damage.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on January 25, 2024, 05:42:38 PM
Sorry, RKhigdon. 

I go and make a post about One Page Rules and didn't even notice you had already done so.   My bad.

No problem at all.  We're all here for the same reason.