Little Soldiers Game Review

Name: Little Soldiers Game Review – Meeple Mountain
Item: Little Soldiers
Rating: 2.5

It’s a “grenade spoon”

January 11, 2026

Justin Bell

5 Min Read

More Board Game Reviews

Join Justin as he goes to war with his children in the family battle game Little Soldiers, published by IELLO!

Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.

Crossbows & Catapults (both the original, and the 2023 update) is one of my favorite games ever. I have dozens of memories created by the wars my brother and I developed on our kitchen floor as kids. Flinging caroms at his light beige plastic walls while screaming in ecstasy. It was hard to beat. Now that I have the new version, going against one or both of my kids with the updated weapon set is still a blast.

Little Soldiers (2025, IELLO) is a new title that gave me Crossbows & Catapults vibes when I picked up a review copy at SPIEL Essen last year. Human and goblin warriors have been replaced by green and yellow plastic soldiers, and instead of a massive box of plastic used to construct castle walls, Little Soldiers makes setup so easy that it becomes a laugher—all you need are common household items taller than the soldiers, which in recent plays have included metal canteens, other board games, gingerbread houses, and plastic cups.

That means that Little Soldiers is harder to classify as a board game since, of course, there is no board. That part is fine. As one user online commented that Little Soldiers feels like something that is really a box of toys with scenario rules that can be used to turn any version of what you want into the game.

With that as your frame…results may vary.

FIRE!!

Little Soldiers is a very light wargame experience for two or four players. (There may be three-player options, but I only tried it as a two-player game since there are two simple armies to control.) There are respawn points, 2-5 soldiers on each side, and dice that are used for simple line-of-sight combat resolutions. Roll more hits than a soldier has armor, and that creates damage, and enough damage kills off a soldier that can respawn in a later round.

The game comes with so many different rule sets that I won’t cover them all here, but the point is almost always the same: take out more enemy soldiers than your opponent does. Turns are easy: move a soldier, use action tokens to activate your soldiers of choice, then take a single action with them. This action could be another move, a shoot action, or a special that varies by the soldiers on the field.

That could be basic stuff, like trying to lower the defense value of a target, all the way to lobbing grenades or mortar shells at a targeted area using a special token and a component my family now calls the “grenade spoon”, in part because it is a spoon on a fulcrum that does a pretty terrible job of flinging a cardboard token.

The basic game format, “Boot Camp”, is so shallow that I would advise skipping it even if you are playing with children. (That’s because my nine-year-old thought Boot Camp was so boring that he offered to stop our already-short three-round game in round two!) Moving into module and/or campaign modes adds more variety, but I’m surprised to report that Little Soldiers never quite got interesting enough to recommend in any format.

Little Soldiers’ best attribute is its simplicity, which means I think it will land best for games between children. By that, I mean that I think my nine-year-old might have more fun with this if he played it only with other kids his age. This adult (i.e., me) was bored with the combat structure almost immediately; moving into a target’s line-of-sight using the short movement strings makes setting up an attack pretty easy. Getting closer to a target only gives a player a chance at an additional re-roll, on top of the single re-roll granted in most combat situations.

I love that some characters have specials that may cause themselves harm. The sniper’s extra die can be helpful, but one of the die faces actually hurts the sniper, so there’s a little risk there. Using anything in my kitchen for the board offered nice flexibility, but the reality was that we constantly used things that were easy to grab and plop on the table. But the soldiers still need to move across flat surfaces because of the movement rules, so it’s not like you are getting deep, height-based combat modifiers for such a simple game.

As an activity for parents looking for ways to entertain themselves with younger kids (let’s say kids ages 4-6), Little Soldiers might be worth a look, especially if you are looking for a dice-based challenge and not a dexterity challenge. If your kids are older and dice are your thing, Halo: Flashpoint was a much bigger success in my household. Halo: Flashpoint had a lot more going on, with a ruleset that was very simple to administer and better-looking terrain.

Despite the fact that Little Soldiers sat on my kitchen table for about a week after our first play, my nine-year-old didn’t want to revisit the game. That’s about where I landed, too; a fine activity but not a formative one.