by Brant Guillory, 17 August 2026
There’s been a few of these pocket-/mini-/travel-sized games launched through crowdfunding over the past few years. Worthington’s got a travel series. Decision’s had their mini-folios in their store for a while. Perry Miniatures has their TravelBattle games. And the Feral Wizards have their Battle Boxes, with Napoleonic Wars already available, and Age of Sail shipping soon.
Bottom Line Up Front: It’s a gimmick first, and a game second. But there is a playable game in here.
click images to enlarge
Everything fits in the box, and yes, the box easily fits in your pocket
You get a couple of dice, a small deck of 18 cards that are used to create your map, two rules folios, and the wooden markers for your forces. Your markers are some thin sticks (8x infantry), cubes (2x artillery), and a chevrons (2x cavalry).
There’s no fixed scale that’s specified. The spaces on the cards contain terrain, but no indicator of size. The forces are identified by their type but not by echelon. There is a bit of relative scaling in there are “stacking limits” on the spaces, but you’re not maneuvering The Coldstream Guards here. Interestingly, some of the marketing material describes the forces as brigades / batteries / regiments, but that terminology appears nowhere in the game itself.
In fact, while we apply French/British by default to the Blue/Red colors, even that level of granularity isn’t specified anywhere. This could be Spanish vs Russians if you want. Hell, it could be the Qajar Empire vs the Maratha Empire, and you wouldn’t have to change a thing.
Each terrain card has 2 ‘spaces’ on it, so that when a grid of cards is laid out according to the instructions, you’ll have a 3×4 grid that creates a 6×4 array of spaces. Terrain is limited to woods, hills, and clear. Hills offer some minor combat bonuses. Woods are impassable (and block LOS) and essentially create a battlefield-splitting obstacle.
There are 2 rules folios. One with the actual rules, and one with “advanced” rules and a couple of scenarios. Of note, the scenarios are not real battles, but archetypes. You’re not fighting Austerlitz and Waterloo and Talavera. You’re fighting Pitched Battle, Flank Attack, and Split Defence.
The actual game series rules are called the “Gunpowder & Bayonets” rules. And as you’d expect, the rules are seriously under-written in order to fit such a small format. There are some diagrams, but no real examples of play to help guide the player. Moreover, the terminology is . . . let’s go with “wonky”. In fact, you wonder if the designers have ever played a board wargame or are just trying to shrink a minis wargame into a traveling form factor. Players are referred to as “CiC” for Commander-in-Chief, instead of just being a “player”.
Those spaces on the cards, that are very clearly, y’know . . . spaces on the cards? They’re not called “spaces”. Nope. Those are “control zones”.
Why not just use “spaces”? We because they use “spaces” for how much you can stack in each control zone, with a limit of 3. An infantry unit takes up 1 “space” in a control zone. Cav is 1-1/2. Artillery is 1/2. You can do the math from there.
But as you’re reading the rules, things that are clearly “spaces” are called “control zones” and for board wargamers accustomed to “zones of control” impacting your opponent’s actions, the terminology ranges from “annoying” to “why am I bothering with this?”
The flow of the turns is pretty simple. You take an action, then a “command test” (die roll) to see if you can keep going. The more you do, the harder it is to keep doing more. Some turns you might get 5 actions before your opponent gets any. Other times you get 2. But the reverse is true for your opponent, too.
Initial deployment and then first turn for each side.
Again, remember that each card has 2 spaces control zones, so both sides can “co-exist” on the same card as long as they’re in different zones.
Combat seems to be similarly simple, but covered in unnecessarily-convoluted terminology. Your orders each turn are “march” (movement), “fire” (ranged combat), and “assault” (fix bayonets & charge). So there are 2 options for poking holes in your opponent.
Fire combat is straight ahead and in range of the unit firing. Line of sight may be blocked by terrain or other units. You can’t shoot over your own units, and you can’t lob rounds over your opponent, even with your artillery.
Assault combat uses a unit’s “melee” value and yes, we’re all wondering why they didn’t just converge the two terms and use the same thing for both the style of combat and the unit’s value but then you remember that they call spaces “control zones” that contain ephemeral “spaces” for stacking purposes and, yeah . . .
Initial combat takes out a pair of infantry units.
Red’s cavalry is deep behind Blue’s lines, having gone around the forest for a flank move.
Anyway, once you’ve scored a hit, the defending unit rolls against their “tenacity” rating for the outcome. And look, “tenacity” isn’t a term that appears often in board wargaming but I’m giving the designers a pass on this one, because it’s as good a term as any other (“defence” or “esprit-de-corps” or “elan” or “toughness” or whatever) and it fits the spirit of the game. So while I’ll bang on them for some dumb terminology elsewhere, this isn’t one of them. Units either break (come off the board) or hold in place depending on the results of their tenacity rolls.
There are rules for flanking, cavalry evasion, infantry forming square against cavalry, and artillery’s inability to attack/defend in assault combat, and skirmish fire. There are optional rules for retreats instead of units breaking, as well as different terrain effects; advanced rules includes unit characteristics (Drilled, Light Infantry, Heavy Artillery, Relentless, etc), as well as multiplayer and solo modes. Unfortunately, these all suffer from the same space limitations as the basic rules.
What’s really needed here is a PDF of a fully-written rulebook with examples of play, and more developed explanations of the rules, and then the folding “rules” sheets in the box itself become bullet-point player aid cards. Of course, this means that you don’t get “everything needed to play” in a pocket box, but if the rules are presented in such a limited fashion that you’re looking up FAQ’s online, or creating your own terminology cheat sheets, did the designers really give you “everything needed to play” in that pocket box?
I’ve only got 3 games under my belt so far, and none of them solo, or multiplayer, or using any advanced rules. I don’t doubt that they each offer nuances to the game that would make it enjoyable. Ultimately, though, this game is a gimmick first, and a game second. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a playable game in here, or that people can’t have fun playing it.
It does mean that the game always manages to feel secondary to the gimmick, and suffers for that reason.
You can chat about this game in the Age of Gunpowder section of our discussion forums
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