The Seven Years' War was the pinnacle of 18th-century warfare, with dramatic campaigns and battles, famous leaders, and wide variety of colourful uniforms. Compared with the later Napoleonic Wars, tactics were simpler, armies more professional, and battles tended to be smaller. Using these quick-to-learn rules, players can bring this period to the tabletop, recreating anything from a small skirmish to a major pitched battle. Although simple, the rules allow for a wide range of tactics and reward historical play. That said, fog of war sometimes produces unexpected results and units don't always obey their orders! The game movies quickly, and players must be prepared to regroup and counterattack or to press home an advantage - a lot can happen in one move!

En Garde! is a small-scale skirmish game based on the successful Ronin rules, in which small groups of warriors fight each other for honour or riches. Rather than just rolling a few dice, the rules allow players to make tactical decisions about how the models that they control will fight - offensively, defensively, or by applying special skills and abilities. En Garde! covers the conflicts of the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries, when black-powder weapons started to become common in battle but martial prowess still determined the outcome.

Play as Border Reivers, Conquistadors, Landsknechts, Aztecs, French Musketeers, Caribbean Pirates and many more, in scenarios that evoke classic engagements of the genre. Sub-plots (secondary objectives for each side) have also been introduced, making gameplay even more varied and exciting. Simple campaign rules allow multiple scenarios to be played in sequence and permit warbands to develop over time. An appendix is also included to provide brief rules for supernatural creatures of the period - monsters, demons, revenants and witches - and new abilities and equipment to fight them, making En Garde! the perfect ruleset for gamers who want something a bit different from the norm.

Black Ops is a skirmish wargame of tactical espionage combat for two or more players. It recreates on the tabletop the tension and excitement of modern action-thrillers such as the Bond and Bourne films, The Unit or Burn Notice TV shows, and the Splinter Cell and Modern Warfare series of video games.

The fast-play rules use regular 6-sided dice and a card-driven activation system to keep all players in the thick of the action, while the mission generator provides a wide range of options for scenarios, from stealthy extraction or surveillance missions to more overt raids or assassinations. Stealth, combat and technical expertise all have a role to play, and players may select from a number of different character types - spies, mercenaries, criminals, hackers, special forces and many more - to recruit the best possible team for the job. Players may also choose to join a faction - powerful organizations, intelligence agencies, criminal syndicates, militaries or rebel groups, each with a stake in international affairs. By doing so, their team may receive certain benefits, but may also find itself limited at a crucial time. With the variety offered by the characters, factions and scenarios, no two games of Black Ops should ever be the same!

Although the standard Black Ops setting is an ultra-modern world just a hair removed from our own, the rules are versatile and adaptable enough to suit OSS operations behind Nazi lines, Cold War-era infiltration missions in Moscow or Berlin, or sabotage runs against a rival corporation's interests in a cyberpunk dystopia, and the rulebook will include a guide to running games in such settings.

 Manchu wrote:
Ronin is not the most elegant rule set, in my opinion. But building the combat system around a secret draw/counter pool mechanic is so brilliant that I can completely forgive certain facets that may be clunky or vague. I really cannot wait to play this game. If it turns out to play as well as I think it might, despite being a rather tedious read, I can imagine using these rules to do French and Indian War skirmishes and Three Musketeer type games.

So, you want to know what wargames are coming out from Osprey Games next year. Well, here is the list:

OWG 12: En Garde! Swashbuckling Skirmish Wargames Rules (Jan 2016)

Frostgrave: Sellsword (ebook mini-supplement, Jan 2016)

Bolt Action: Duel in the Sun (Feb 2016)

Horizon Wars: 6mm Hard Science-Fiction Wargames (Apr 2016)

Frostgrave: Dark Alchemy (ebook mini-supplement, Apr 2016)

OWG 14: Poseidon’s Warriors - Classical Naval Warfare 480 BC – 31 BC (Jun 2016)

OWG 15: Broken Legions – Fantasy Skirmish Wargames in the Roman Empire (Jul 2016)

Bolt Action: Konflikt ’47 (Jul 2016)

Frostgrave: Into the Breeding Pits (Jul 2016)

OWG 16: The Men Who Would Be Kings – Colonial Wargaming Rules (Sep 2016)

Frostgrave: Arcane Locations (ebook mini-supplement, Sep 2016)

OWG 17: Rogue Stars – Skirmish Wargaming in a Science Fiction Underworld (Oct 2016)

OWG 18: Chosen Men: Military Skirmish Games in the Napoleonic Wars (Nov 2016)

Frostgrave: Forgotten Pacts (Nov 2016)

Okay, we admit it, we haven’t actually revealed quite everything, but we’ve got to keep a little mystery right?

 sing your life wrote:
By "Duel in the Sun" do they mean the North Africa theatre of WW2? And didn't Warlord say they had planned a great war supplement for BA sometime in 2015?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The problem with Victory At Sea is that Mongoose wanted to own WW1 by producing their own range of ship models that was a different scale from everything else already on the market.

If they had stuck to a decent set of rules and good quality modern models in the same scale as already existed, people might have been persuaded to supplement their existing collections.

 Easy E wrote:
They should also add proprietary dice too!

Spoiler: