There are designers who release a game every couple of years and there is Mike Lambo. Since 2022 he has produced an astonishing number of solitaire book games – well over twenty titles by now – and the pace does not seem to be slowing down. To my constant surprise and amazement, as one of his own booklets puts it, there are simply too many of them to list.

The formula is always the same and always works. You get a booklet, usually somewhere between 30 and 60 pages. Inside there is a short historical introduction, the full rules with plenty of examples and pictures, and then a set of missions or scenarios. Each mission is a spread: the map on one page, all the rules you actually need to play on the facing page. You add your own dice and counters – either photocopied from the back of the book or, as I usually do, borrowed from a tactical wargame sitting on the shelf. Combat Commander, The Last Hundred Yards and D-Day at Tarawa have all done duty on my table for these games.

Why do I keep coming back to them? Price to performance, first of all. Then the fact that they are genuinely replayable – variable setups and randomly revealed opponents mean that no two plays tell the same story. And finally, they are the perfect travel companion. A booklet, a handful of counters and three dice fit into any bag, whether you are going on holidays or on a business trip. I have said it before in my travel wargames lists and I will keep saying it.

Below are the four titles I have covered so far on the channel, each with the full teach and play material and a few words about what makes it tick.

The Fields of Normandy 2

This is the sequel to the original The Fields of Normandy and it puts you in the boots of a US platoon leader in France, 1944, loosely following the path of VIII Corps during Operation Cobra. Under your command are three rifle squads, a machine gun team, a bazooka team and a mortar team. The rules run to about twenty pages, but do not let that scare you: everything you need during play is condensed onto the single sheet facing each mission map.

A turn is short: advance the turn marker, activate your units, then let any revealed Germans reply. Each of your units rolls two dice (only one if it is on low morale) and you pick one of the two results, which translates into a pair of actions from the unit’s own table – rally, fire, scout, move, grenade, take cover, assault. That single choice is the whole engine of the game and it is surprisingly tense, because the die that gives you the assault you wanted rarely gives you the move you also needed.

The Germans start as question marks. Approach one and you roll to see what is really there: a rifle squad with a sniper, mines, a light or heavy machine gun, a half-track, artillery or, worst of all, a tank. Scouting from two hexes away is the safe way to peek, and it also lets you sneak around the enemy facing. The mortar never attacks by itself but grants a hefty bonus against any target exactly two hexes away, which makes positioning it the first decision of every scenario. The bazooka is your only answer to tanks, half-tracks and artillery.

There are twelve missions, playable on their own or strung into a campaign in which you randomly draw six of them and track casualties and victory points across the whole run. You have ten turns to clear the map and the faster you do it, the more points you score. In the material above I play Mission 2, Crossroads – most people show the first mission, so I deliberately went one further – and finish with eleven points and a lot of German mines discovered the hard way.

Battles of Normandy

Same beaches, other side of the hedgerow. Battles of Normandy covers the British 6th Airborne Division during Operation Tonga in 1944, around Caen and the canal. Historically the German troops in that sector were often second line units, but the Allies were scattered by bad drops and had to fight with whatever happened to be at hand – and that is exactly what the game models.

The setup is where this design really shines and it is the reason I called it extremely replayable in the video. Both sides get ten points and buy their force by die roll: a rifle squad costs one, a machine gun team two, a half-track or, for the British, a PIAT team or sniper costs three. Every point has to be spent. Then you roll for the column and for the depth of each unit’s placement. I have never had the same board twice. In the recorded game the Germans ended up with three machine guns clustered into a defense perimeter with overlapping fields of fire, which turned an ordinary scenario into a meat grinder.

Combat is elegant. Defense equals the distance in hexes plus terrain – two for a building, one for woods – plus one more if a British unit has taken cover. You roll the unit’s attack dice and need at least one die equal to or higher than that total. Since you are rolling six sided dice, your effective range is six hexes at absolute best, and usually much less. Activation is a two dice roll per unit: one means take cover, two to four means move, four to six means attack.

The German AI is a procedural table, no flowcharts, and I love how it is organised: half-tracks act first, then machine guns, then rifles, each rolling two dice and executing the lower result before the higher one. Reinforcements arrive on turns four and seven, and an event roll each turn can drop mortar fire, hand out a cover marker or return a lost British squad to the map. One rule is easy to forget and brutal: you win only by occupying both objective hexes. Kill every German on the map and sit on nothing by turn ten and you have still lost. I was decimated in the recorded session and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Ghosts of the Jungle

This one came back from vacation with the corners visibly worn, which tells you everything about how much I played it. Ghosts of the Jungle leaves the Second World War behind and drops you into Vietnam, June 1966, with the 3rd Squadron of the Australian SAS – a unit the Viet Cong genuinely feared. You command Sergeant Allen and Troopers Baker, Clark and Dixon on recon patrols, commander eliminations, rescue missions and more.

The rules are short, around ten pages, and once again everything you need sits next to the mission map. The map itself is a compact five by seven grid and movement is strictly orthogonal – no diagonals. Terrain matters: open ground, jungle, rocks that block both movement and line of sight, ponds that block movement only, and huts. The number of jungle or hut icons printed on a tile tells you how many units can hide there, and hiding is the heart of the game.

Each trooper has three condition levels which also determine how many dice he rolls, and Allen grants an extra die to anyone sharing his tile. Results let you move, hide, unhide, shoot, throw a grenade, tend a wounded man or go hand to hand. Then every Viet Cong counter rolls two dice of its own to move, shoot or hunt for hidden troopers, and the turn closes with an event: reinforcements, a sniper, a truck rolling down the road, or the blessed all clear. Shooting works but it is noisy, and every noisy kill puts a fresh Viet Cong back on the map.

That is the key insight here: this is not a game about killing everybody. Very often it is far better to stay hidden and unseen. In the material I play Mission 1, a reconnaissance in which all four SAS must reach the top row of the map on tiles free of Viet Cong. We won, but not without damage – a sniper and a truck both took their toll along the way.

Hostage Rescue Squad

The most recent of the four and the one that steps furthest away from historical wargaming. Hostage Rescue Squad is fictional: an elite tactical unit built to pull hostages out of situations that have gone badly wrong. You lead three operatives – Andrew, Beth and Carlo – and the whole game fits on two sheets of A4, map on one side, rules on the other. Setup takes about thirty seconds.

Each operative rolls three dice. Low results are moves, fives and sixes let you shoot, and doubles unlock the good stuff: grenades, opening and closing doors, and the silent kill. Anyone standing on the same tile as Andrew may reroll dice, which quietly makes keeping the squad together a real tactical consideration rather than a nice idea. The other constant pressure is the threat level. Each hostile turn you roll dice equal to it and resolve the results in order – hostiles shoot, hostiles advance along the red dots and blue triangles printed on the map, and every six adds a brand new hostile on a random tile. Shooting raises the threat level. A silent kill does not. You can see where this is going.

One rule worth flagging because it is unusual: cover is not reciprocal here. You cannot see into a covered tile, but a unit inside it can see out. In Mission 1, The Cabin Crew, you have to reach a businesswoman held in a cabin and get her plus all three operatives off the bottom edge of the map. Everyone has to survive. I did not manage it in the recorded game – I pushed too fast, left a hostile alive when I could have dealt with him, and paid for it. That immediate urge to reshuffle the counters and try again is exactly why this design works.

What Is Coming Next

Four videos in and I am nowhere near done. A fresh parcel has just landed on my desk with four more Mike Lambo booklets, and every one of them takes the system somewhere I have not been yet – a huge armored battle, a single tank in the Pacific, ancient warfare and the Battle of the Atlantic:

All four will be played, and all four will be reported here on the blog and on my YouTube channel. Stay tuned – and if you have not tried any of Mike Lambo’s booklets yet, pick one that matches a period you like and see for yourself. The price to performance ratio is, quite simply, hard to beat.