Damned Hot Work is a miniatures wargaming system primarily designed for 25/28mm models, and is a fast and simple game that should allow large battles to be fought easily in one evening - or a couple of skirmishes - recreating the drama of combat with dice rolls and a deck of cards.

This is a wargame heavily dependant on a glorious theme - it's actually buried miles deep beneath the Earth's crust in theme! Fight melees between British regiments of Foot, coal-fired robots, fezz-wearing villains, snarling, leaping mummies, knife-twirling Chinese henchman, hordes of spear-chucking Zulus, ferocious African wildlife, ravenous dinosaurs, mad scientists, and rifle-wielding Sikhs; or any bizarre combination that tickles your fancy.

DHW is set in a romantic fictional universe, half a world away and over a century ago. Most battles and skirmishes take place in the hot, mountainous country of Quarajanistan. Though bloodthirsty action has also been spied on the dinosaur-infested Namajaro Plateau, in the steaming jungles and Lost Valley of the Baka-Mang, and the deadly, secret Kingdom of the Kuji-Gani.

The game is based loosely on the well-known wars of British Colonialism: Northern India, the Zulu War, the Boer War, the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns, but also includes many fantastical elements. In the world of DHW, it is not uncommon to spy an armoured airship, coal-fired borrowing contraption, Martian Tripod, steam-powered tank, or even lancers on unicycles! During the course of play, expect to encounter heinous villains, malodorous creatures, and indecent foreigners - the likes of which can only be foiled by true-blooded Englishmen, usually followed by a stiff brandy and cigars.

Inspired by books and films such as The Lost World, War of the Worlds, The Mummy, Zulu, Zulu Dawn, Master of the World, At the Earth’s Core, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Valley of the Gwangi, and many others, DHW is a light wargame.

So, deterministic combat, and other such popular systems, that take away from the drama of game playing – are not part of the game before you. Also, there is a trend that as you learn more facts about a historical period, you instinctively add more detail to the game rules; the result being more detailed, complex rules systems that take longer and longer to finish on the game table. DHW is not that type of system. DHW has put to the sword: quality checks, leadership tests, and endless weaponry charts and the like. Speed of play and ease of use is at the heart of the game.

To enable you to concentrate on manoeuvring your forces, DHW has streamlined other clunky command and control mechanisms, into an elegant and simple system: you roll movement dice for distance. By one simple roll of some dice, leadership, discipline, training, unit morale and terrain irregularities have all been addressed. This means troops move a varying distance at a time, depending upon dice rolls, rather than moving a predictable fixed distance each turn. This represents the fickle nature of warfare, as well as a large element of surprise caused by the inability of commanders, to understand what is happening beyond their immediate position on the ground.

With combat, DHW ups the suspense and the drama by settling any close-combat scuffles by pitting figure against figure, and opposing players roll dice with simple modifiers and the high total wins. This contrived game mechanism is engineered to accomplish one thing - excitement. Individual combat resolution is the closest players will ever come to actually crossing sabres. Ranged fire is resolved using a standard target number, adjusted by a short list of modifiers.

An often-cited shortfall of wargaming design, is that the player who rolls better dice than their opponent will always win. This is generally true, and some would say this reflects the chaos of battle and the vagaries of command. Damned Hot Work addresses this issue with Feather Tokens, gifted to each player whenever they fail certain die rolls. These tokens can be spent in multiples of four on later turns to buy instant-kills, or succeed morale checks, or move a unit more aggressively.

Damned Hot Work can trace its parentage back to Gaslight, Gutshot, Song of Blades and Heroes, and The Sword and the Flame.

Although events such as the Sepoy Mutiny may be played out on the gaming table, DHW is not a history lesson. This is a game played with tin soldiers, forts, and a bucket full of dinosaurs. It is not a history class on Colonialism.

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