Ever fancied uniting a fractured, war-torn Japan under your own banner? Oxford publisher Osprey Games has a new rulebook with your name on it. Daimyo, out on 30 July 2026, is a fast-play mass battle wargame set in the Sengoku period, the century and a half of civil war (mid-15th to early 17th century) when rival feudal lords tore the country apart fighting for supremacy.
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Start organising for freeYou play as a daimyo, a great lord, assembling an army of unit contingents and leading it to crush your rivals. Designed by Alexander Smith with artwork by Giuseppe Rava, the game uses different dice types to represent unit quality, hands your commanders special abilities to swing a fight, and wraps the battles in a map-based campaign system so a single clash can feed a longer war for control of Japan. Osprey pitches it as a balance of "beer and pretzels" accessibility and genuine historical flavour.
A quick word on what you are buying. Like the rest of the Osprey Wargames series, Daimyo is a self-contained rulebook rather than a boxed game with miniatures, so you supply your own figures. That is the same affordable, army-agnostic line that produced the hit fantasy skirmish game Frostgrave and its sci-fi cousin Stargrave, and at GBP 14.99 for an 80-page paperback it is a cheap way to try mass-battle gaming.
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See how it worksDaimyo (series number 38) kicks off a strong run of Osprey wargames this year. The WWI trench-raiding game Trench Raiders follows in September, and the orc-warlord skirmish game Pillars of Gromlak lands in November.
If samurai warfare is your thing, this is a low-commitment entry point. Gather a rival lord or two, perhaps from your local gaming community, and start carving up the map.
Sources: Osprey Games | Osprey blog | Tabletop Sentinel
