The website Skirmish Codex calls itself a “community catalog” of skirmish wargames, where gamers can discover, review, and submit new games to a growing library of titles. There are 129 games listed at the time of writing, and – as someone who loves discovering weird little wargames the world has never heard of before – I don’t know whether to be delighted or intimidated. I’ve got some homework ahead of me if I want to check out everything in the list.
Skirmish Codex’ stated goal isn’t to cover every miniature wargame, or even all the best miniature wargames, just all the skirmish games. That means games played with small forces of individual characters, with defined scenarios with win / loss states – so no free-form RPGs – and published rulebooks; self-published PDFs are in, homebrew documents sitting in Google Drive are out.
You can tell it’s a work in progress – most of the big names like Necromunda, Kill Team, Frostgrave, and Trench Crusade are there, but Mordheim is conspicuously absent, waiting for someone to submit it. And while users can submit reviews of the games, so far no-one has stepped up to the plate. Here’s the link if you want to get involved!
Skirmish Codex lists a lot of games that I’m keen to learn more about, particularly ones that are due to arrive this year. I’ll point out a few that caught my eye: Grave Trigger looks heavily inspired by the early ’90s anime Guyver; Hallowtide is a skirmish game inspired by Bloodborne and published by Black Site Studios, a sentence laser-targeted at the desire centre of my brain; and Kolluseum is a super-indie game of corporate-sponsored bloodsports published on Itch.io.
I’m currently debating the etiquette of re-posting some of my reviews from Wargamer on the site to get things going. I’ve published reviews of Kill Team, The Doomed, Fallout Factions, Star Wars Shatterpoint, Necromolds, Snap Ships Tactics, and D&D Onslaught for the site, all of which fall into the skirmish game mold. Just listing them out – a random sample united only by the fact I happened to review them – highlights how incredibly varied the genre is.
Do you have any skirmish game recommendations? Come and share them in the Wargamer Discord community – after you’ve added a review to Skirmish Codex, of course.
Source: Wargamer
