Wargame Design: Green Army Men: Plastic Men, Steel Resolve- Dexterity Based Combat

Around Christams 2016, my family holiday was playing a lot of Flick'em Up! by Z-man Games with my family and their kids.  This was an eye-opening .  We were having tons of fun and flicking stuff all over the place.  The next year in 2017, we played a ton of Total CARnage.  This was a car combat game based on flick and dexterity mechanics after playing Flick'em Up!  Again, a great time was had by all!

Right afterwards my daughter challenged me to make another dexterity based game, but using plastic, green army men.  She wanted it ready by Christmas 2017.  Well, I didn't hit her deadline but I did get it done for her!

I present to you; Green Army Men: Plastic Men, Steel Resolve
 

The goal of this game were the following:

1. Create a game using plastic Army Men
2. Resolve all actions using Dexterity based resolution
3. 1:1 Terrain
4. "What You See Is What You Get" gameplay
5. No specialized wargaming components
6. Simple and basic resolution
7. Use only found materials
8. Fast, simple, and furious games
9. A game for almost any age or experience level

This is intended to be a simple and straight forward ruleset for playing dexterity based wargames with newcomers to the wargaming hobby.  Instead of the usual tools of the trade like Dice, Rulers, Miniatures, Scenery, etc. it is intended to use everyday items and found materials to play fun, fast, and tactically challenging games using found items and ordinary plastic toy soldiers.  The rules are scale and model neutral and dispenses with the usual concepts of ground and time scale and other intricacies.

I started wargaming when I was a youngster, about 10 years old.  However, I frequently did not have the scratch to buy “real” metal models.  Therefore, I used what I had.  What I had was lots of cheap, plastic toy army men mostly made in Taiwan, Korea, and China.  Soon, I was using those to stand in for more formalize models to fight battles with the early rulesets I could get my hands on; including the works of Featherstone and Grant from my local library.  Ever since those days, I have yearned to build a game that only uses plastic army soldiers.  

I look forward to hearing about your adventures on the kitchen table (or anywhere really) of battle with your plastic army men.

You will be able to find this game at the Wargames Vault here.