I'd been tinkering with this game concept, in miniatures and boardgame format, since mid-1990. Long-time readers will of course recognize the material from the Encyclopedia Irvania referring to the odd sport played by Irvanians, known variously as Slargeball, Gludgeball, or simply Slarge. The sport has similarities to soccer, rugby, hockey, American-style football, and baseball, with a few original twists thrown in here and there.

These miniature rules are presented here as a free download for the amusement and edification of the gaming public. I'm breaking with my normal procedure by presenting the rules here in HTML (web page) format rather than my usual Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The players really seem to prefer this format, and the photographs of the miniatures are inspiring in their own right.

This is the latest version of the rules, based on the core of the miniatures rules run by ArmourSoft at several game conventions in 1992-1998. The DTP Slargeball boardgame "game kit", with hexmap and counters, was based loosely on these miniatures rules. The basketball-like Gludgeball miniatures rules were also based on the earlier ruleset, and in fact the three game systems have a fair amount in common. The changes from earlier versions of the rules are listed in the Introduction section. After over a decade of playtests and rules tweaks, it's now a much faster-playing and smoother game.

The Rules: Click here to proceed to the Slargeball! rules. Warning: there are five pages with a fair number of photos, so they may take a while to load. You can print these pages directly from your web browser. However, if you're going to be making a lot of copies or you want to save your color ink or toner cartridges, use this version instead as it has all the photographs removed and will print on fewer pages.

As with everything else around here, comments are always welcome. Let me know how the HTML format works for the rules. Go ahead, try playing the game. It's very "wargame-like" in the way it plays.