Let’s be honest, if you’ve been around the miniatures hobby long enough, you’ve probably got more unpainted plastic than you’d like to admit.
Maybe even an army or two still on sprues. And if you’re like me, you’ve read through thick rulebooks full of lore and special-case rules...
and then never quite got around to playing the game.
This isn’t that kind of game.
RUSS — the Russellmania UniversALL Skirmish System — is a play-with-what-you-have, modular miniatures agnostic game designed to let you use any minis you have across any setting you like. Whether you're into post-apocalyptic survival, alien bug hunts, gritty cyberpunk raids, or classic fantasy dungeon crawls, RUSS gives you one tactical engine to rule them all.
The rules are simple to learn, fast to play, and built for customization. Created for solo and co-op play, but it can also work for PvP if you're more folused on fun than rules loopholes. Create a few characters, grab some dice and terrain, and you're good to go. No official minis required. No gatekeeping.
This isn’t that kind of game.
RUSS — the Russellmania UniversALL Skirmish System — is a play-with-what-you-have, modular miniatures agnostic game designed to let you use any minis you have across any setting you like. Whether you're into post-apocalyptic survival, alien bug hunts, gritty cyberpunk raids, or classic fantasy dungeon crawls, RUSS gives you one tactical engine to rule them all.
The rules are simple to learn, fast to play, and built for customization. Created for solo and co-op play, but it can also work for PvP if you're more folused on fun than rules loopholes. Create a few characters, grab some dice and terrain, and you're good to go. No official minis required. No gatekeeping.
The Russellmania UniversALL Skirmish System is a Print and Play (for now) ruleset targetted for you to use your ample stockpile of miniatures and terrain
to play a small scale, quick skirmish battle. Primarily for solo-play despite the first pass of the core rules perfectly lining up PvP, the goal of these
rules is to allow 1 person to manage a team of up to 4 characters against whatever size horde of enemies said person wants to wrangle. While geared for
a 2' x 2' play area in an effort to keep the scale and action tight, that part's just a suggestion.
RUSS offers a few game mechanics that make it unique amongst all the other rules out there.
RUSS offers a few game mechanics that make it unique amongst all the other rules out there.
- While combat driven with 4 distinct Combat Stats, there's also (mostly optional) 4 RPG matching stats to help make scenarios more than Go and Shoot.
- Players have a tiered Health System that helps prevent that 1st overwhelming attack from knocking them out of the game. Most of the time.
- NPC enemies are presented in their own unique expansion. This not only helps from overwhelming players while learning, but if you don't want to use alien NPCs then there's no reason to trudge through their rules and wonder if it's ok to skip (it's prefectly fine to skip).
- Combat isn't a lot of math and measuring. Distances are intentionally short, and combat is resolved by pairing dice from attack and defense - if the attacker wins more of those pairings, damage is applied.