# Two-Hour Wargames *Created:* 2023-12-15, *Modified:* 2026-11-06 Two Hour Wargames' whole pitch is that your troops don't actually need you to tell them what to do, and Ed Teixeira has been getting a game out of that one idea since 2000. The company was built on a refusal to wait for your turn — the famous rejection of IGOUGO — and let the **Reaction System** do the pacing instead: figures react to seeing the enemy, to taking fire, to a man dropping next to them, and the battle plays out like a firefight rather than a chess clock. It's the rare wargame line that talks about solo play like it's a feature and not a compromise, because nearly everything they publish runs alone or cooperatively as happily as it does across a table. ## The publisher THW is a one-designer catalogue with a house engine rather than a world: Teixeira writes the rules and hands them out under product codes (2HW-1010 for **Guns & Girls**, 2HW-1057 for **Red Streets, Blue Mats**), sometimes with a co-designer or an artist, and lets the line accumulate period by period. The commercial shape says as much about the design as the rules do — the free **[[Chain Reaction]]** is handed out as a gateway, early releases went out as slide-format PDFs, and **Machinas** was funded through Indiegogo. Everything published since is, in one sense or another, Chain Reaction wearing a new coat. ## Setting There is no single world — that's rather the point. THW is less a setting than an engine shopping for homes: the same d6-versus-Reputation core turns up in zombie outbreaks, Vietnam, the Old West, the Second World War, the arena and the stock-car oval, and the only thing shared between them is the reaction table. A THW game is a genre with the engine dropped into it, which is why the catalogue reads as a list of periods rather than a franchise. ## Mechanics Everything hangs off the **Reaction System**. There's no initiative in the traditional sense; figures simply react. See the enemy and you roll their nerve; take fire and you roll it again; watch a friend drop and the whole squad checks itself. **Reputation** is the yardstick and the d6 pool does the talking, with results like Carry On, Duck Back, and Out of the Fight deciding who's actually still standing. It's light, it's fast, and it's why a THW game can be set up, fought, and packed away inside a couple of hours. ## The lines The catalogue sorts into lines, each with its own page. Every line runs on **Chain Reaction** unless its own page says otherwise. - **[[5150|5150 Universe]]** — the sci-fi universe rather than one game: a whole line of books sharing the engine, from a lone Star to fleet actions. - **[[World War II]]** — the infantryman's war at squad level, and the armour that arrived to support it. - **[[Vietnam]]** — one war, one game, revised rather than replaced. - **[[Warrior Heroes Fantasy]]** — adventuring in Talomir: warbands, dungeon-building, and the naval battles that happen when the adventure goes to sea. - **[[Faster, Pussycat. Kill, Kill]]** — the racing line: wasteland circuits and stock-car ovals, and a card-built engine where the race is the game. - **[[Nightmares]]** — the horror end: outbreaks, old gods, and things with too many teeth. - **[[Blood Sports]]** — fighting games: the cage and the arena, and a crowd that paid to watch. - **[[Adventure!]]** — lost worlds, the post-apocalyptic frontier, and the pulpy edges of the catalogue. - **[[One-Offs]]** — the ones without a line yet: single games, small engines, and the odd experiment. ## References **URL:** https://twohourwargames.com/