# Guns & Girls tags: #game/wargame/guns-and-girls ![[Guns & Girls (cover).jpg|600]] Here's a 2002 product name that was never going to age gracefully, and yet. **Guns & Girls** is Two Hour Wargames' early man-to-man combat game — 24 pages of "fast and furious game of heavy firepower," bought two decades of goodwill by being the skeleton the whole Reaction System line grew out of. It's the company's awkward teenage years in rulebook form: all the genes that would make **Ed Teixeira's** skirmish engine famous, before they'd learned to walk in polite company. ## Setting There is no world here, and the book is quietly proud of it. The back cover throws eras at the wall — World War II, bug hunts, colonial wars, Vietnam, B-movies, Al Capone's Chicago — which is a long-winded way of saying "anywhere a modern gun can go." "What do all these things have in common? Heavy firepower," it asks, and for once the marketing isn't overselling. Your setting is wherever you decide to point the guns, which is the same flexible nothing the rest of the THW catalogue would later sell back to the hobby as a virtue. The genes of the company's future are all here in rough draft: **Reputation**, the 1D6-plus-Rep hit roll, and the **Reaction Check** that decides how a figure copes with being shot at. It's the pre-[[Chain Reaction]] engine, doing the thing the whole line would keep doing for twenty years. ## Mechanics Combat is man-to-man and damage arrives by two routes: weapons fire and hand-to-hand, because the other options are not yet on the menu. The core is the early Reaction System, in its bluntest form — a figure's **Reputation** plus 1D6 against the **Hit Table** resolves a shot, and the **Reaction Check** handles the moment someone's nerve gives out under fire. There's no initiative-by-token here yet; the reaction roll *is* the turn order, which means the seed of the whole company's design philosophy is already sitting in 2002, unpolished but unmistakable. Lean, rough, and honest about it — this is what gets re-skinned into a decade-and-a-half of games that all roll the same way. ## Editions - **Guns & Girls** (2002) — an early Two Hour Wargames release (2HW 1010), by Ed Teixeira. *In the library.* (The library also holds an old draft record of this line.) **Guns & Girls** is an early **[[Two-Hour Wargames]]** game by **Ed Teixeira**, the ancestor of **[[Chain Reaction]]** and the wider Reaction System family. ## References - [Two Hour Wargames — Two Hour Wargames site](https://twohourwargames.com/)