the active player chooses a target at which to fire, and rolls a number of six-sided dice equal to the Rate of Fire of the attacking unit. The die roll required is equal to the range rating of the attacker's weapon. Depending on terrain, the target may get a saving throw to negate the attack. During close combat, the same rules are used, but the defender fires first. If the attacker survives, the attacker returns fire. This continues until either the attacker or defender has been destroyed. Publication history In the late 1990s, Ty Beard became frustrated with slow-moving wargames. After a particularly trying session of Combined Arms — a miniatures wargame published by Games Designers Workshop — in which only four turns were completed in 8 hours, Beard decided to design a streamlined system to produce faster-moving games. The result was a set of rules for modern combat titled A Fistful of TOWs, a coil-bound paperback self-published in 2000 written by Beard with contributions by Dave Burnett, Paul Minson, and Bob Mackenzie. In 2010, Fistful of Games released a second edition of the rules, a 204-page coil-bound softcover book written by Ty Beard that expanded the timeline of the rules back as far as 1946. In 2011, Fistful of Games released a greatly-expanded 458-page third edition written by Ty Beard and Paul Minson that expanded the timeline back to 1915. Future planned additions to the series are FFT:2030, covering the hypothetical wars of the mid-21st century, and Railgun: 2100, covering science fiction armored combat. Reception Mark Severin thought that despite the length of the second edition, the rules were "easy to read and very well presented." He also liked the executive summary included with each chapter and the detailed table of contents. In 2020, researchers at Rand Corporation looked for a commercial wargame that would serve their combat simulation research purposes and wrote that "Ground combat experts on the research team determined that FFT3 represented ground combat at the required level of granularity to allow our research team to simulate [remotely operated] and fully autonomous combat vehicles." The authors concluded that they were able to obtain the research results they needed using FFT3, saying, "Using the FFT3 commercial wargame as a basis, the researchers demonstrated how postulated [artificial intelligence and machine learning] capabilities could be incorporated into a tactical ground combat wargame." References External links A Fistful of TOWs