The main rules we use for 1588AAT are taken from Games Workshop's excellent Lord Of The Rings strategy game. It is pretty much the ultimate skirmish ruleset, for pre automatic weapons. They pretty much proved this themselves, first with the Warhammer Historical release of Legends Of The Old West and its supplements, then by the further release of Legends Of The High Seas. So the first thing you need to do is go and get yourself one of these excellent rulebooks.

These days I tend to use LOTHS (Cos I wrote some bits in it) but I always refer to LOTR when in need of clarity. The statistics used in the Army Lists use the LOTR names. But I am pretty sure you will be able to work out how the stats change from one game to another.

Our rules are not definitive. I will gladly chat with gamers about the ins and outs of rules and we find that we are often cross referencing between different rule books.

So my first message is very much: APPLY SOME COMMON SENSE! Often tricky to do in the heat of the game. I have always liked the GW way to settle disputes; roll a d6 to see who gets the decision during the game. Then discuss it like grown ups after the game.

We started playing all of our games as skirmishes. This was how we wanted the game to feel. I prefer to play games in 28mm, where one figure represents one man. Skirmishing therefore makes the most sense as it is an affordable way to start to play. However as some of my friends started to invest in figures for this game we started to find some of our games getting bigger.

Then GW released LOTR - War Of The Ring which introduced bases of troops and I also bought the LOTW Alamo supplement, which has company rules. Although not fully decided which works best, we have now got to the point where we define if a scenario is going to be a battle or skirmish, thereby indicating the rough size of forces and also the kind of weapons that would be more likely to be present. (Having walked around a fair bit in the real world with a fifteen foot pike we decided it was unlikely that pikemen would carry pike if they had popped out to do a spot of nicking)

SO WHAT RULES HAVE YOU GOT THEN?

Right I'll stop rambling and you can see some of what we have written so far, be aware this is an evolving game and we may make occasional changes to these rules.

Most rules in LOTR apply in these games. the rules we first had a need for were

Armour & Helmets              Hand to Hand Weapons

 Missile Weapons             Forming a block