Review: Table Top Battles - Grid Wargaming With Miniatures

THIS is officially the second edition of a set of rules that first came out in 2004 as Table Top Armies, but was republished with amendments as Table Top Battles in 2007.
Although it has only 58 pages of A4 paper within flexi covers, the booklet, which I got for £15-plus-postage from Caliver Books, has much in it despite using fairly large print.
Photos accompanying the text are excellent, showing just how attractive miniatures can look on a surface of gridded squares.
Quite a bit of thought seems to have gone into designing the cover and, naturally, the rules, which generically cover ancients through horse-and-musket with many supplements, including ones for naval warfare, air combat, fantasy and solo gaming.

Well-designed cover

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the wording of the rules, which contains some really appalling and baffling English.
It starts with the Forward (sic): "Table Top Battles has sold around the world albeit in small numbers and has had a good reaction from the Public when staging Participation games. Admission granted by the Newbury And Reading Wargames Association at their annual warfare event named Warfare."
Again: "After Table Top Battles appeared, other rule sets based on the square grid have been published. Written by some big names in the war game hobby industry."
This carelessness with basic English is perhaps not of great importance in a foreword, but it creates doubt in the rules themselves.
For example, page 18 covers "Hand to Hand Combat (Using a 12 sided die)".
Before getting to the combat mechanics, we are told: "(b) Some types of stands have a chance to avoid combat."
The stands are listed, and then comes: "(c) Throw a die for the stand trying to avoid combat. The score must be a '4' or more. If this is attained the stand can be moved back 1 square minimum, 4 square maximum, facing the enemy."
Apart from the poor grammar, the question arises: do the authors, Michael and Joyce Smith, mean a 4 on a 12-sided or six-sided die? The former gives a 75% chance of success, the latter a 50% chance. Perhaps the answer is obvious to you; it isn't to me.
Issues like this might have been cleared up by including what every set of rules should have, in my opinion: a detailed play-through of a battle.
Enough criticism; what do I like about Table Top Battles?
As I have already stated, the booklet is generally well-presented and a lot of eventualities are covered in the rules.
These are not, and do not pretend to be, suitable for tournaments at wargame conventions - there are too many possible bones of contention and the rules are not period-specific enough for most tastes.
What they are very much suitable for, as I hoped when buying, is simple battles that emphasise the toy-soldier aspect of the hobby rather than model-soldier realism.
The rules could certainly be used for refighting famous battles from history. Indeed it is quite possible I will be using some of the Smiths' ideas in an upcoming project I have for refighting the Franco-Prussian War in 54mm-scale.
The great advantage of using a gridded table-top is it almost completely eliminates one of the biggest time consumers in wargaming - measuring movement and firing distances.
The Smiths recommend using a grid of 16x12 2in squares. That is a total of 192 squares, which may sound a lot but only requires a table 3ft by 2ft 6in.
You would not need to rebase figures, provided they are on bases which fit inside the squares, eg the popular base-width of 40mm would be more-or-less ideal.
To sum up: despite its easily avoidable faults, I regard Table Top Battles as a pleasing addition to my wargaming library.