Spirit:
     Just a quick note about the intent of these rules. Lego® is a toy. (A brilliant, engaging, and challenging toy, but still a toy) The intent therefore is to have fun. While anal retention has it's place (such as carefully sorting all one's bricks by color and piece type), it is not appreciated in a game. Thus these rules are very casual. The primary purpose of these rules, and of Lego® wars in general is to get together with a bunch of similarly minded Lego® maniacs, and build our toys, and then play with them. The object is only vaguely to win.

Introduction:
     I recently got back from Holland, where Lego® is everywhere, and much cheaper than Canada. This served to re-addict me to Lego® - needless to say, I exceeded my duty-free allowance with it!
     Anyway, Lego® appears to be chain reaction thing, because within a week of my getting back and showing things to my friends, they all dug their old Lego® out of dusty boxes and the backs of parental closets, and pretty soon we were set up for a war.
     However, when cruising the net trying to find rules, I only found one or two systems for Lego® wars, and they were horribly complicated. Where were the simple rules (mostly made up on the spot) from my childhood? If I wanted complicated, I'd play Warhammer® with minifigs.
     So, we needed rules, and having spent hours attempting to make things easier by finding someone else's rules, we gave up and made our own in about 10 minutes. Those rules, slightly modified, are what you find below.

Rules
                                 Just a quick note: the abbreviation 'CM' stands for 'Convenient Measure'
                                 which is my way of saying use what you want. We used the 'outstretched
                                 pinky to outstretched thumb' method, and it worked just fine.
     Period: We're all medieval freaks, so we play mostly with castle and pirate stuff. We use cannons too, but that's just cause they're fun. (fun, of course, being the whole point)
     People: Minifigs, parrots, dragons, alligators, they're all the same to us. We do try and distinguish between decoration and actual units that can move and fight.
     Heroes: Everybody gets 12 'hero points' (or 5, or 10, or 17.2, or however many you like, really). You can distribute them how you feel like (five 1 point heroes, a 2 and a 5 point hero, or whatever). Each Hero point a minifig has adds + 1 to all combat rolls, and 1 extra 'hit'. (hits are explained later)
     Weird things: Some of us also have a tendency to build weird monsters and cool-looking things. Creativity being the whole point, we reward this with 'cool points'. Neat things get 1 cool point, and really neat things get two (or more). Cool points act just like hero points.
     Movement: Minifigs can move two CM's. Horses and flying things can move four. Most vehicles move at the same speed as whatever is pulling it (slave drawn siege towers are popular with our group), or one less CM if it looks really big and slow. Other things move about as fast as you think they should. (alligators, for example, moved 2 CM's on land, and 4 CM's in water) For flying things, a good way of keeping track of where they are is to stack a number of blocks beside them to indicate how many CM's they are up. Everything goes through rough terrain (incl. forests) at half rate.
     Combat: Combat is resolved by rolling 6-sided dice. Each combatant rolls a die, modified as below. If the attacker beats the defender, its a hit (a palpable hit). You roll seperately for attack and defense unless two minifigs are attacking each other in melee, in which case it's an attack roll on each side. Each defender rolls only once, even against multiple attackers.
     Modifers:
     Armor: any piece of external armor (i.e. not painted on the minifig) means the fig is armored and adds +1 to all combat rolls. Note: a minifig with a helmet and breastplate is at +2. Note: Armor does not add to attack rolls in ranged combat.
     Shield: this adds +1 to defense rolls.
     Weapon: Each weapon a minifig is holding adds +1 to attack rolls. Exceptions: The big polearm-axes are +1 to the roll, but do two 'hits', and longbows are +2. Both of these weapons need two hands.
     Mounted/Flying/Height: Any minifig 'above' another one adds +1 to combat rolls. This counts mounted figures, flying things, and people on castle walls.
     Cover: If a minifig is partly behind cover, (from the attacking minifig's viewpoint) it gets +1 to combat rolls. If it is completely behind cover (ducked behind a wall,shooting through a window, etc) it can't be hit.
     Charging: Mounted minifigs with lances get an extra +1 to attack if they move at least two CM's before attacking. Lances are otherwise useless in melee combat (making a sword attached to that saddle clip a REALLY good idea)
     Use common sense when applying the combat modifiers. For example, while dragons have neither armor, nor shield nor weapon, we considered them armed, armored and shielded for the purpose of the rules. They also got 1 'cool' point. This made them +4 on attack rolls (armed, armored, 'cool' and height advantage), +3 on defense (armored, sheilded and 'cool') and able to take 2 hits, which seemed about right.
     Ranged Combat: Minifigs with crossbows can attack three CM's away, and minifigs with longbows can attack five. Things that have breath weapons have a range of one CM.
     Catapults (or, tossing things at other things): If you can build it, and it looks (even a little bit) like minfigs are operating it, then you can use it. Some very ingenious designs have been done that are scarily accurate, and will, given repeated hits, reduce walls to rubble. One person had to reduce the tension on his 'wall-smasher' because it was breaking bricks. Not walls, bricks. Oh, and the missile of choice around here is the heads from maxifigs (a.k.a. giants)
     Traps (and other nasty bits): Anything goes. Keep in mind that cool and interesting is much preferable to nasty. (see Spirit) Although both is of course, better. One of our local maniacs designed a falling floor trap that would drop several minifigs to their death on a pit of spikes.
     Cannons: References to cannons in these rules mean the cool ones that fire, not the wussy ones they give you in North America. (grumble grumble bitch) We decided that cannons kill a minifig that they hit, either directly, or on the first bounce. Yes, that means that every once in a while, a cannonball will kill two minifigs. (I've only seen it happen once) Cannons are different from other tossing things because the cannonballs don't usually have enough velocity to knock over a minifig (our usual measure for if a trap or tossing things weapon works) Cannons take two minifigs to operate them.
     Dying: Your people die if:
a) they take more hits than they have. Most can take 1 hit, modified by Hero and cool points.
b) hit by a cannon ball
c) knocked over, squashed down, sent flying, or otherwise abused by a trap.
d) knocked over, squashed down, sent flying, or otherwise abused by giant, uncontrollable monsters. One of our maniacs owns cats, and another has a two year old. It is considered bad form to bribe the giant monsters, or to drag string through other peoples armies.
     Hazards:We think that the wilderness should be a dangerous place for the unwary. Therefore, we usually have natural hazards out and about. The most common ones that we use are the remote shrine and the monorail dragon. Usually we give natural hazards enough 'cool' points that it's easier to just avoid them, but they can be killed if necessary. The shrine was just something that shouldn't be messed with, as it summoned a very nasty balrog, who stomped on whoever was dumb enough to mess with it's shrine. In the case of the monorail dragon, it was considered armed, armored and higher than everyone, as well as shielded. This gave it a basic +4 in combat. We then gave it 5 'cool points', making it a very nasty + 9, and able to take 6 hits.
     Hard-to-kill Things: We noticed that some things on the field (like the monorail dragon, for example) were pretty much impossible to kill. So we added a rule for multiple people attacking a single target. Each attacker that rolls a six on the die can choose to try and cause a hit themselves (which is normal), or to add +1 to the next attacker who gets a six. In this way, hordes of minifigs can swarm on big nasty things, and eventually kill them (after incurring heavy losses, usually)
     Winning: Who cares? We had fun!

Optional Rules: Why? Because there's always options!

     Hero points: The only optional rule that we use much was letting people use their hero points for things other than +1 combat and +1 hit. These included being able to make an extra attack, 'super fast' which let a minifig go at horse speed, extra range (+1 CM per hero point), and anything else which was neat and not too powerful. One person used hero points to make his crocodiles fire-breathing, and another to let his monkey use all 4 limbs and balance on its tail.
     Flee Screaming:We decided (shortly after someone let the Balrog loose) that a minifig could go twice as fast (4 CM's) by dropping its weapons, turning tail and running

Lego® is a registered trademark of the Lego® Group, and Warhammer® is a registered trademark of Games Workshop.

This document is another Just This Side of Arrogence(tm) production, and is copyright James Brown. Inquiries can be directed to galliard@shades-of-night.com. If I see this elsewhere not credited to me, I will sulk and whine. If you make money off it, I will want some.