Just this last week, the Second Edition of ‘Valour & Fortitude” was released. This rule set is authored by Jervis Johnson, former designer and manager of Games Workshop, co-creator of Age of Sigmar and other titles, like Warhammer 40k, and the Perry Brothers, Alan and Michael, from Perry Miniatures. This new 2nd edition of the free rules set has improved upon the original version that was published in 2022.
The original rules set was published in Wargames Illustrated’s Issue 418, Oct 2022 edition, as well as being available on the perry-miniatures.com website for free download. In addition to the rules set, links on the Perry Miniatures website included Army stat sheets for the major armies of the Napoleonic period as well as updates to the rules set.
Originally published with the crazy goal of being the shortest rules set for Napoleonic tabletop wargaming – at only 4 pages long, Valour & Fortitude was a bit ‘bare bones’. But, it made for an easily accessible and highly-enjoyable rules set.
But its brevity did create a lot of questions by an avid, and growing, fan base, which led to much of the edits that were reflected in the edited versions 1.X on the Perry Miniatures website, and eventually led to the development and publishing of this new version 2 of the rules.
The gaming community should feel very fortunate to have such a gift. But, if there was any negative comment that could be made to this second edition is that it did not organize its information (including clarifying designer comments) in an easy to follow format (especially for some of us older Grognards).
If its goal was to create a short, concise rules set that could be referenced easily and quickly by players, we humbly suggest that it missed the mark. Explanations for rules, along with designer comments, were not added to the rules where they would have helped. They were added as separate notes on a page in the back of the packet.
This organization still requires that players flip between 2-4 different locations in the new rules set to get a complete picture of the rules. And even though this may keep the 4-page rules set intact, it doesn’t help clarify the rules easily.
So, with that said, we took the new rules set and created a version of them that incorporates the designer comments into the rules where they apply. We have called this new version – “The Tabletop Wargames for Dummies Edition”.
We take no credit for the document’s content. We have tried to retain every word, as it was originally published by the authors Jervis Johnson, Alan Perry, and Michael Perry. We just re-arranged their text copy to make it more ‘user-friendly’ for our gaming table. And this is a ‘bare bones’ Google Docs version, so we didn’t spend a lot of time on formatting.
But, we are sharing this version here as we thought that some of you might enjoy this version as well. It is a testament to how much we enjoy this new rules set that we wanted to make it as useful as possible for us.
Bonus Cheat Sheet Included
In addition to the re-arrangement of the designer’s comments, we added a ‘cheat sheet’ for the Unit Special Rules. This cheat sheet only includes those Special Rules that are included in the two army stats sheets included in v2 of the rules. (We anxiously await new army stats for the v2 game rules like you).
We intepreted the special rules so that we could isolate their effect on unit movement, unit fire attacks, and unit melee attacks for our quick reference. We’d be interested in knowing if other players find this format useful.
Please download a PDF version of our “Tabletop Wargames for Dummies Edition” using the link below. And we would love to hear your thoughts. Did we do justice to these great rules? Do they help you and your tabletop opponents to get to the rules quicker?
We have to say again that we really appreciate the rules set that Jervis, Alan, and Michael developed. We hope that they don’t take offense to our humble re-organization of their great work.
With that said… Let the games begin!
