by Jim Owczarski, 13 May 2026
It would be a fair contest to compare how many people have made money writing wargame rules for miniatures and how many have been launched to space. In the former category, Dr. Sam Mustafa is a bright light.
He has written more than a dozen rule sets including personal favorites like Blucher, Lasalle, Eisenhower, and Longstreet. He keeps the lights on at home by serving as Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Global Studies at Ramapo College in New Jersey, where he has taught since 2001. He also teaches at the Council on International Educational Exchange in Berlin.
His most recent project is Scourge of Princes covering the period of the Renaissance which he, never afraid to stake a claim, dates from the late 15th through the early 17th Centuries. He was kind enough to take some time and answer questions about the rule set, his writing process, and why his rules are typically so well drafted.
Full disclosure: Several Armchair Dragoons and myself were pleased to be play testers for this project.
1. I know and the Armchair Dragoons certainly know, but, for those that do not, who are you and what have you done?
I’m a mild-mannered college professor, specializing in modern European history and politics. I’m not nearly as dangerous as I seem on paper. That being said, I am responsible for fourteen miniatures games over the past twenty-five years. This makes fifteen!
2. You seem to let rule sets gestate for a long time before committing to the writing and testing process. How old is the idea that became Scourge of Princes?
Scourge took about a year and a half. That’s pretty normal by my standards. Probably slower than more famous games from more famous companies, but I pride myself on thoroughness. We playtest, edit, and proofread a lot more than most. I want to get it right the first time.
3. Having been involved in the play testing for Scourge of Princes for some months, my impression is that you began this project targeting the 15th and 16th Centuries. I believe the record would reflect that this has a far smaller following either here or overseas than the Thirty Years’ War or the English Civil War. What, then, was your interest in the earlier period?
The idea originated with my collaborator John Holly. (“Scourge of Princes,” in fact, was his title.) He has been wanting to do a game on the 16th century for a long time, and I was daunted by the design challenge, and by the fact that I didn’t know enough about it. I do a lot of homework for a game, even when I know the period well. In this case I really took advantage of my job as a professor, with access to research libraries and academic databases. There were mountains of books beside the bed for a while.
4. Related to the above — and you are sworn to tell the truth — you knew you would have to include the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War eventually, right?
As word started leaking that we were doing it, nearly everybody begged us to include the first half of the 17th century too. That ended up pushing the game’s completion back by months, because it added another layer of complexity and detail. And of course that meant more homework. The upside is that I now have a decent grasp of the ECW.
5. What mechanisms in Scourge of Princes do you feel do the most to evoke the period on the tabletop?
We developed several original ideas that are unique to this game. For example:
a) Combat Resolution. This period is radically asymmetrical. Units have wildly varying sizes, formations, capabilities, mobility, and so on. Instead of trying to burden the combat system with all of that in the traditional way (modifiers and steps), we created a very simple resolution mechanism, and THEN you take that outcome to an “Outcome Matrix” that tells you what the results look like, by cross-indexing who is fighting whom. Light cavalry, for example, scatters and gets out of the way of advancing infantry, loose-order troops shatter when attacked by heavy, ranked troops, and so on.
b) The aforementioned “Scatter” rule is a nice way to allow mounted units to retreat off-board and then reappear in the next turn as reinforcements in the rear. They regroup, usually a bit beat-up, but the short-term result is that their enemies have cleared the field in front of them and that means: the battle changes and becomes more dynamic.
c) Shooting. This period witnessed slow but comprehensive changes in firepower, both in the technology and in the doctrine for its use. So there are different shooting mechanisms, depending upon what sort of shooter you are, and there are different sorts of results. For example, perhaps that enemy skirmishing has merely annoyed and distracted your men: in game terms “Harassed” them. Although that causes no casualties, it forces you to send your commander over there to sort those units out, if you want them to move in any complicated way, or if you want them to attack. By contrast, the musketry of the later 17th century armies can be very bloody, but those units hang in there and take it.
6. What mechanism was the hardest to get right?
One of the biggest fundamental challenges was trying to decide what a “unit” was. Unlike more modern periods, a “unit” in the Renaissance could be virtually any size, shape, or composition. To what degree should “sleeves” of arquebusiers, for example, be independent, functioning “units”? Or how about the 600 swordsmen that Lord So-and-So ordered to hold the walled church at the Battle of Schlürpfen?
I think a lot of games try to get literal about representing the tactics: if you don’t have every component manifested literally, if you’re not going through some simulacrum of the motions of moving every little tactical subunit, then you’re not getting the “flavor.” We decided to challenge that by putting those tactics and capabilities into the units’ traits. That kept the unit footprints very simple, made movement and combat much faster, and still got the flavor right.
7. What mechanisms are people going to see in Scourge of Princes that will surprise them?
Defending units don’t fall back. Either they hold their position, or they break (or in the case of cavalry, “scatter.”)
I hate all the “magic movement” that happens outside a unit’s normal movement allowance. Each special sort of movement (like falling back or advancing after combat) requires a whole subset of rules to govern it, and to govern what happens if – on a crowded battlefield – you can’t do it as written. I want the combat resolution just to be combat resolution. Movement is movement.
Things like this allow us to streamline the process and reduce the number of rules and steps that players have to remember.
8. Having played a lot of your titles — I have joked on-line from time to time that we really ought to be the “Dr. Sam” channel or similar — I have noticed that you rarely, if ever, provide scenario books or supplements after your rules are released. You always include campaign rules, club rules, and similar to increase re-playability, but only a scenario here and there. This feels like a deliberate choice. Is it? And, if it is, why did you make it?
We’re definitely going to have some sort of scenario supplement for this game. John Holly is working on it right now, in fact. That’s mainly because the historical scope of this game is so broad that if you have an interest in X-period, you might be put off by only seeing scenarios for Y-period.
All my previous books include a chapter on how to make scenarios, they all feature at least one sample scenario, plus an introductory scenario, and they all have a chapter on how to create fictional scenarios and a generator for doing so. And then of course the players start posting their own. For the Napoleonic games, there are literally hundreds now.
But I just don’t have the time to do it all, myself. I’m a full-time educator, designing games in my spare time, and I want to design games, not scenario books. I’m not the sort of designer who does one product and then flogs it year after year. I want to move on to the next interesting project.
9. I am not fawning when I say you have a deserved reputation for clean, tight rules that do their best to file off what our play test group refers to as the “spikey bits”. Related to this you seem driven to simplicity over chrome. How did you come by this approach?
I’m a teacher and a writer: two professions that emphasize effective communication. Games aren’t my only written products. I write both histories (just finished a new one, in fact, that’s coming out in November) and novels. So getting the writing right is very important. Before I got into the game business I was typically disappointed by how awful the writing was in most wargame books. That’s not just an aesthetic objection (although there was that, too). Bad writing makes it harder to understand what happens and in what sequence.
Generally, my goal is to get everything stylistically harmonious, with the fewest possible steps, exceptions, and frankly just the fewest possible details to remember.
10. How would you appraise the state of the miniatures wargaming hobby in 2026?
I feel very disconnected from it these days; I haven’t been to a game show in a while. The relative health of the hobby seems to vary widely by region and topic. (Historical / Fantasy / Sci-Fi, etc). But historical tabletop wargaming, from what I can tell, is in better shape in Britain than it is in the USA.
OK, we lied, here’s one more—
11. What is the best period for historical tabletop wargaming and why is it Napoleonics?
The best period is the one in which your favorite and best-looking unit makes the perfect game-winning move, and you roll a “6.”
My thanks to Dr. Mustafa for taking the time. Scourge of Princes is available now. A full review is forthcoming.
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