One of the most popular and long-lived sets of wargame rules, at least in the USA, The Sword and the Flame by Larry V. Brom was originally issued by Yaquinto Publishing in 1979. It was focused on the well-known wars of British Colonialism: Northern India, the Zulu War, the Boer War, the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns.

Revision 1, containing minor changes, was released by Greenfield in 1986. Supplement 1 came out in the same year, expanding the scope to include the French and Indian War, the Boxer Rebellion, and the campaigns of the French Foreign Legion.

In these editions, one figure represented one man, but movement, morale and combat is by the unit, the basic European unit being the 20 man platoon. TSATF has been described as a semi-skirmish game. Unit movement is determined by die roll, different types of units under different circumstances rolling differing numbers of six-sided dice. Random card draws decide which units move first, and also determine the effects of fire and combat.

The Ouargistan group started out using The Sword and the Flame rules, but soon modified them for faster play with larger numbers of figures. Special rules were added for vehicles, ships, buildings and special situations, usually changing from scenario to scenario. Over the years the modifications grew so numerous that only the basic structure of the game remains, but it is a good structure, and has provided the basis for a great deal of fun over the last 20 years.

For more detail on the group's use of TSATF, with anecdotes, click here.

Third Edition. The third edition of The Sword and the Flame from Greenfield changed the basic concepts somewhat. Each figure represented 10 men and the figures are mounted on multifigure bases. It was packaged with starter units of vinyl figures. Our group has never played with this edition, so the Major General cannot comment on it.

THE SWORD AND THE FLAME 20th Anniversary Edition

Including THE SWORD IN AFRICA - an all-new Small Unit Variant

The rights to TSATF have been acquired by the original author, Larry Brom, who has published the rules again in a 20th Anniversary edition. It returns to the original one-man-base concept, but incorporates expansions and improvements suggested by 20 years of experience with the rules.

For more information on The 20th Anniversary Edition, click here.

Larry now has official pages for TSATF-related matters on the Major General's website.
Be sure to read the The Birth of Some Rules, and the official Errata Page for TSATF.

Group Variants
People have asked about the Ouargistan Group's rules. Lately the group has used The Sword and the Flame/20th, with variations or special rules as specified by the designer of the game's scenario. Occasionally, we vary the routine with other rulesets, usually for a single-figure skirmish type game.

Prior to the release of the TSATF/20th, the group used two simplified variants of The Sword and the Flame written by group members. They are Max's set, known as The Maxwellian Variant, and Alan's marvelously titled Rules Britannia.These are loose guides, not comprehensive sets, and rules questions are usually settled ad hoc, by cocking an eyebrow at the scenario designer or the author of the particular variant being used, who usually makes up an answer on the spot.

Other Rules Sets
for Colonial Gaming
Recent additions and updates in Red type.
Other commercial miniatures rules covering the Colonial period include:

• Piquet - An innovative free-flowing system that dispenses with conventional turn and movement structure. The Colonial-era module for Piquet is Din of Battle.
• Volley and Bayonet
• Principles of War is out in a second edition for 2003 (new URL).
• Fields of Honor
• The Soldier's Companion from Space:1899 is a well-respected ruleset for colonial battles that also contains Victorian Science Fiction elements.
• Science versus Pluck (the Major-General's personal favorite rules-name)
• Savage Wars of Peace
• Fire and Steel (skirmish rules)
• Rampant Colonialism
• Duel Moderne (skirmish rules - French)
• Soldiers of the Queen
• The Sand of the Desert
• Imperial Splendour (a computer-moderated miniature wargames ruleset)
• Battles for Empire 1870-1902
• Tuan, simple rules for the Boxer Rebellion
• Victoria's Battles, a series of rulebooks for Egypt, Zululand and the NW Frontier.
• Fire and Discipline is a 1:10 ruleset for non-European combat, 1750-1850.
• Indunas, Colonels and Emirs is a 1:10 ruleset for colonial combat 1850-1900.
• Glory! is a fast man-to-man skirmish ruleset, 1700-1900
  

The Ouargistan group has never used any of these, though Steve has made some empty threats of giving Piquet a try because of its radical structure.

Online Rules Sets
The proliferation of online free colonial-era rulesets has become too great for the Major General to keep up with in his late-life muddled mental state. The list below will no longer be updated.
For recent listings, the reader is referred to the 19th Century section of Pete Jones' excellent
Free Wargames Rules site.

• Volley Fire - TSATF author Larry Brom's online 1:1 full-ground-scale skirmish rules. "By Gawd! Everything is in range!" Part of the By Jingo! colonial gaming web magazine.
• Science versus Pluck, or Too Much for the Mahdi - Howard Whitehouse's classic Sudan ruleset is finally available once again in downloadable form.
• In the Heart of Africa, the official rules for Foundry's/Copplestone's superb Darkest Africa miniatures line.
• Bob Cordery offers three rulesets: SCWaRes (Simple Colonial Wargames Rules), Bundok and Bayonet, and 'Eres To You, Fuzzy-Wuzzy (Sudan Campaigns).
• The Sun Never Sets, Dave Waxtell and Barry Gray's brilliant campaign rules for TSATF. Each player is simultaneously a Member of Parlaiment, a British Colonial commander, and a native Chief in a different region.
• With MacDuff to the Frontier - Ross Macfarlane's colonial rules, originally published in The Courier.
• Jolly Irregular Fun is Philip Gray's update of H.G. Wells' Little Wars concept, for smaller figures, using tiddlywinks for rifle-fire and flicked wine-corks for artillery fire. The Major General may have to resign his Temperance Society membership.
• Sandstorm - Army Men's simple online colonial rules for 54mm figures and toy soldiers.
• Colonial Rules - Wrexham & District's online rules for 15mm
• Imperius Maximus - Colonial Variant for DBA - Niel Laird's adaptation to the Colonial era of the innovative and wonderfully simple (if murkily written) commercial ruleset for Ancients, De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA).
• Rencounter is Ed Allen's skirmish ruleset for the 16th to 19th Centuries, and includes a Zulu War scenario.
• The Rules of Engagement is a battle-system for use with Victorian Role-Playing Games.
• Zulu!!! is an "interactive ruleset" to which readers are invited to make additions.
• Fire & Sword in the Sudan is a campaign game of the Mahdist rebellion, including simple battle rules.
• A Fistful of Tripods is an adaptation of the Fistful of TOWs rules to H.G. Well's War of the Worlds.
• Tripods and Hussars is a different system for War of the Worlds, from the same people.
• Orc's Drift is a set for Victorian gaming in a Tolkienesque fantasy universe.
• Tim Peterson has a Free Rules page with links and short comments on these and other rules.
• A DBM-style colonial ruleset, DBC: De Bellus Colonialis, available by email from James Spargo.
• Colonial Warhammer adapts GW's popular slaughterfest to work wif da Britz an da Zooloos an like dat. Thanks to Sven Noren and Joel Crook for doing the legwork to get a URL that allows downloading and printing.
• The Green Hell is Castaway Art's short ruleset for West African jungle colonial warfare to go with their Ashanti War figure line.
• Four rulesets - Fire and Sword in the Sudan, Stand To, Zulu, and Two-Page Skirmish Rules - are available on Steve Winter's The Colonial Angle site.
• The By Jingo! site contains numerous colonial rulesets, including Little Colonial Rules (a card-driven skirmish game), The Sun Never Sets (a campaign game) and They Don't Like It Up 'Em (another), The Game with No Turns (a free-flow TSATF variant), Ubonga (solo African campaign), The Kris and the Flame (a South China Sea variant of you-know-what), More Gunboat Diplomacy (a supplement to GD), With Hicks in Kordofan (a "multiplayer solo game"[!] for the Sudan), and heaven knows what else by now.
• The Free Wargames Rules site lists many of these and other downloadable rulesets for the 19th Century and other eras.
• Pot That Fellow, Somebody is Bob Bergman's small-unit fast-play ruleset. It joins Rules Britannia and Science vs. Pluck: or Too Much for the Mahdi in the Major General's 'Rules Title Hall of Fame.'
• Tanzanica is a modification of the commercial Mordheim rules for use in colonial Africa.
• Three rulesets - Sahibs and Sepoys (Indian Mutiny), 'Splorers, Savages, Soldiers and Slavers (Africa), and Infernal War Machines (landships and aerial contraptions) - can be found on Alan Hamilton's site.
• The Splendid Little War (Spanish American War) and Tierra y Libertad! (Mexican Revolution) are available on the Historical Miniatures Wargames Resource Site.
• The Jackson Gamers club (where Larry Brom once walked among us) has a rules site with two TSATF variants: The Sword in Mexico (Foreign Legion, 1860s) and The Sword in Palestine (WWI), The Brom Standard Wargames Rules (multiperiod, with charts for Egypt 1882) and a number of other rules sets and Brom-iana.
• Gabriel Landowski's Colonia is a short set of turn-of-the-century rules.
• Thick as Grass and Black as Hell is a Zulu War game for 1/300 figures at a 1:1 figure ratio.
• Tim Peterson's The Mexican Adventure page has three rulesets dealing with the French in Mexico ­ Maximilian Rules! and The Sword in Mexico (a different version of the Jackson Gamer's variant for TSATF), as well as Camerone!, solo/club rules for the epic last stand of Capt. Danjou's Legionnaires.

See also the Rules Commentary on some of these sets, gleaned from the rec.games.miniatures.historical discussion group and the Major General's own mailbag.

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