If you know someone who wants to play Warhammer 40k, but has a hard time with the stacks and stacks of rules, check out Kidhammer. At just two pages long, this super simple indie game by designer Nick Christie is tailor made for accessibility.
Christie started work on the project because his girlfriend, who loves kitbashing and painting miniatures, wanted to play Warhammer 40k with him. “She is autistic, and for her, focusing on and tracking so many rules through multiple books is extremely overwhelming”, Christie explains. He adds that his partner told him to explain the rules to her like she was a kid.
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He started to research “games for kids, rules explanations for kids, and kids playing Warhammer”, with the goal of making a truly kid-friendly version of the game. “Most of what I found was dads knowing all the rules, and kids just doing whatever they say”, Christie says. He wanted “to help kids that are into the look of Warhammer feel that they can play the game with their friends”.
So it is that Kidhammer is truly, deeply, simple. You can download the rules directly from his blogspot. The rules for setting up the game take up one side of a sheet of paper, and the rules for playing the game fit on the other. The rules sheet is laid out to help kids easily find information: one edge of the sheet has a movement gauge printed on it, and the steps of the turn have clear number labels for their sequence.
I wonder how this compares to https://www.onepagerules.com/ in practice.
Just by reading them, they seem to strike a good balance between approachable and overly simplified.
Kidhammer rules are way simpler. Models don’t even have individual statlines.
OPR is fun, but it is still a streamlining of the kinds of concepts wargamers are already familiar with. It appeals to adults and teens who can understand 40k rules, but don’t feel like dealing with them. Kidhammer throws all of that out the window to make rules from the ground up that a kid who doesn’t wargame can pick up in one game.