Alan (Duchy Of Tradgardland) mentioned that I should look at this post or website by Roger Halvorsen, where he tries out the very simple ‘old school’ Donald Featherstone Close Wars Rules (appendix to War Games, 1962) to fight a modern era skirmish.
You can read this post by Roger at his Model Rails and Wargames blog:
https://modelrailsandwargames.blogspot.com/2022/12/close-wars.html
In his search for very simple rules, Roger pushes the Close Wars rules past their original setting (or ‘comfort zone’) of French-Indian Wars colonial forest skirmish with ‘natives’ and ‘troops’ to the tropical forest and urban edge of a fictionalised part of an African country in the early 1960s.
The Blue Helmet UN forces tackle the local well-equipped green helmeted local African forces.
As befits a mention on this my Pound Store Plastic Warriors blog, I like the way that Roger has used simple and cheap, widely available dollar or Pound Store Soldiers. 54mm Modern / American Infantry (TimMee / BMC /Toy Story type) and plastic Matchbox figure copies (US Infantry) have been used, differentiated with two different paint schemes.
It shows what a good simple paint scheme will do for such versatile figures.
Roger has some interesting Pro and Con points to make about the simplicity and drawbacks of these two page rules for modern warfare including vehicles and automatic weapons.
John Yorio in the blog comments suggested to Roger using Featherstone’s World War Two rules from War Games or Battles with Model Soldiers.
At the end of the day, much of the experience of infantry combat on foot with rifles in forests or even urban jungles cannot have changed much in two hundred years, apart from more accurate or rapid fire rifles?
Melee and hand to hand fighting (at boot, fist, blade and bayonet level) cannot have changed much either.
This is good basic rules tinkering, working out how and if to include heavy weapons. Is a machine gun is just modern volley fire from 5 or 10 men (as Featherstone often uses) when not using individual figure firing?
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Roger links to my 2016 Close Wars early blog post here with the two page original rules pages :
https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/close-little-wars-featherstones-simplest-rules/
Post by Mark Man Of TIN, 10 December 2022
Pound Store Plastic Warriors 