Richard Clarke designs wargames where the enemy is not the only problem.

Your own platoon is a problem. Your leaders are a problem. The terrain is a problem. The fact that the right order has to reach the right men at the right moment is a problem. The fact that soldiers do not behave like perfectly obedient wooden blocks is the whole point.

That is Clarke’s gift.

He does not treat historical miniatures as chess pieces wearing period uniforms. His best games ask a harder question: what does it feel like to command people when information is incomplete, communication is fragile, and fear is doing its own work on the table?

That design philosophy became the house style of Too Fat Lardies.

The name is funny. The games are not casual about command.

Chain of Command, Sharp Practice, I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum, Dux Britanniarum, What a Tanker, and the wider Lardies catalog all circle the same problem from different angles. A commander can have a plan. The battle does not owe that plan obedience.

That is why Clarke matters.

He made friction the center of play.

Playing The Period, Not The Rules

The Too Fat Lardies phrase that follows Clarke around is simple:

Play the period, not the rules.

It sounds like a slogan. It is really a design argument.

Many miniature wargames reward perfect rules knowledge more than period thinking. A player learns the geometry of charge ranges, firing arcs, modifiers, exceptions, and optimal formations. That can produce good games, but it can also turn history into a puzzle about exploiting the rules text.

Clarke pushes in another direction.

The rules should make period behavior feel sensible. If the game is about platoon-level World War II combat, players should worry about junior leaders, fire and movement, shock, deployment, patrols, morale, and what the men can actually be made to do. If the game is about black powder skirmishing, command should feel different. If it is about company-level World War II action, the player should not experience the same decisions as a platoon skirmish game in a larger hat.

That is the Lardies instinct.

The rules are there to make players think like the people they are pretending to command.

Not perfectly. No game does that. But enough that the player stops asking, "What is the most efficient move?" and starts asking, "What would a commander in this situation be able to understand, order, and risk?"

That question changes the table.

The Battle Before The Battle

Chain of Command begins before the shooting starts.

That is one of Clarke’s sharpest design moves.

Most wargames begin with armies already deployed. The players set up their forces, measure distances, and start the turn sequence. Chain of Command opens with the patrol phase, a pre-game maneuver of patrol markers that establishes where forces can deploy and where the front of contact begins.

It is not decoration.

The patrol phase makes reconnaissance and approach-to-contact playable. The players do not yet have squads blazing away. They have feelers moving forward, probing for position, trying to shape the battlefield before anyone knows exactly where the fight will break open. By the time the first troops appear, the game has already been affected by scouting decisions.

That is why the mechanism lands.

It turns uncertainty into terrain.

The resulting jump-off points give players a way to bring forces onto the battlefield from plausible forward positions. The line of contact is not just a deployment zone drawn by the scenario. It is something the players helped create under uncertainty.

That single pre-game idea does a lot of work.

It makes the table feel less like a parking lot where two forces politely lined up to shoot each other. It makes the opening of the battle feel discovered rather than declared. It gives both players decisions before the first weapon fires.

Clarke starts with the not knowing.

That is the design in miniature.

Command Dice And Human Limits

Chain of Command’s command dice are just as important.

On a player’s phase, dice determine which leaders and units can be activated. The player may want a section to move, a team to fire, a junior leader to rally shock, or a senior leader to coordinate the wider platoon. The dice do not always provide the clean order structure the player wants.

That frustration is the point.

At platoon scale, command is not omnipotence. The lieutenant cannot personally inhabit every soldier. Junior leaders matter because they turn intention into action. A section without the right leadership attention may not do the thing that would look obvious from the player’s chair.

Many wargames model battlefield uncertainty by making shots miss.

Clarke models uncertainty by making command imperfect.

That is a deeper cut.

The player can see the table, but the miniature officer cannot see everything. The player knows the ideal plan, but the platoon has a chain of command. The player wants a machine. The game gives them people.

This is where Chain of Command earns its reputation. The command dice, patrol phase, jump-off points, shock, force morale, and leader activations are not separate clever bits. They work together to make the player feel like they are trying to guide a living organization under stress.

When it works, the game produces a very specific kind of tension.

Not "Can I calculate the best move?"

"Can I get my men to do enough of the right thing before the situation changes?"

The Lardies Catalog

Too Fat Lardies is not only Chain of Command.

I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum works at company level in World War II, using card-driven activation and the uncertainty that comes from not knowing when formations will act. Sharp Practice moves into black powder skirmishing, where leaders, personalities, formations, and period flavor matter as much as clean firepower. Dux Britanniarum brings campaign structure to post-Roman Britain, where raiding, reputation, and long-term consequences sit beside battlefield decisions.

What a Tanker is lighter, faster, and more beer-and-pretzels in tone, but even there Clarke’s instincts show. Tank combat becomes a sequence of immediate problems: acquire, aim, move, shoot, reload, survive. The player is still inside a machine that refuses to become fully predictable.

The periods change.

The central concern stays.

Command is not the same thing as control.

That idea gives Clarke’s catalog a stronger unity than the product list alone suggests. The games are not simply "historical rules for different eras." They are attempts to make different kinds of historical command feel distinct at the table.

In Sharp Practice, leadership has swagger, personality, and narrative color. In Chain of Command, leadership is small-unit pressure. In I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum, command stretches to larger formations. In Dux Britanniarum, the campaign frame changes what a battle means before it begins.

That range matters because it shows the philosophy can travel.

Friction is not a mechanic.

It is the design lens.

The Niche That Got Louder

Clarke’s influence is not measured like a mass-market board game designer’s influence.

Too Fat Lardies is a niche historical miniatures publisher. The community is passionate, vocal, and deeply engaged, but it is not the same scale as a global hobby brand. That matters if you are measuring commercial reach.

It matters less if you are measuring design conversation inside historical wargaming.

The Lardies approach changed what many players expected from platoon-level World War II rules. Chain of Command made patrols, jump-off points, and command friction part of the conversation. It gave players a language for complaining about games where every unit obeys like a parade-ground toy. It rewarded players who understood historical tactics and punished players who treated the table as a puzzle detached from the period.

That influence shows up in the way people talk about games.

Does this feel like command?

Does it model friction?

Does it make historical behavior sensible?

Those questions are now part of the serious miniature wargaming vocabulary, and Clarke is one of the people who put them there in modern form.

He did not invent friction in wargaming. Older designs had command control limits, card activation, variable turns, fog of war, and morale systems long before Too Fat Lardies became a recognizable name. But Clarke made friction friendly enough, playable enough, and period-specific enough that a large community could build around it.

That is not a small thing.

Good historical design is not only about accuracy.

It is about getting players to care about the right problems.

What He Actually Built

Richard Clarke did not invent historical wargaming.

He did not invent card activation, command friction, morale, or uncertainty. He did not build a mass-market brand, and Too Fat Lardies remains a specialized corner of the miniatures world rather than a household name.

What he built was a design language for command friction that players could feel.

In Chain of Command, he made the pre-battle search for contact matter. In the command dice, he made leadership capacity matter. In force morale and shock, he made cohesion matter. Across the Lardies catalog, he made period thinking matter more than rules exploitation.

That is the honest contribution.

Clarke’s games ask players to stop acting like gods floating above a battlefield. They ask players to become commanders with limited reach. You may know what should happen. You may even know what needs to happen.

Then the dice tell you who is actually listening.

That is where the game lives.

Where To Find Him

Richard Clarke remains active through Too Fat Lardies.

The official Too Fat Lardies site is live, with Chain of Command 2 available in rulebook and PDF form, along with ongoing supplements, tokens, and related material. The current Chain of Command 2 page describes it as the final edition of the award-winning World War II platoon-level rule set, with the patrol phase and command system still central to the design.

The community is active as well. The Too Fat Lardies forum continues to host Chain of Command discussion, questions, errata talk, and rules interpretation, with current threads running into 2026. In the United States, Age of Glory represents Too Fat Lardies and Reisswitz Press products, keeping the line visible for American players.

That is a healthy place for a niche historical rules publisher to be.

The patrol markers are still moving. The jump-off points are still being placed. Somewhere, a player is looking at command dice that do not quite give them what they wanted.

And that player is learning the lesson Clarke keeps teaching.

Command is not control.