When we last left off the designer diaries, we had talked about Five Men in Normandy. 

As the game was getting out there, raising questions and spawning discussions, a number of people began asking for a version that would not be specifically set in the Second World War. I decided to take a hatchet to the rules, cut out most of the chrome and detail and release it as a smaller, stand-alone game.The idea was that it would be roughly intended for post WW2 gaming and that you could buy two packs of miniatures and get them to the table quickly. If you wanted to f.x. get started on doing Cold War gaming you might buy a pack of West Germans and a pack of Soviets and instead of having to do up a whole army, you could just paint up 8 or so guys each and have a go at it.

The game had to be called something and since it was the core of the Five Men system, FiveCore came to mind as both fitting the topic and sounding pretty dashing to boot. As a side note, while people often refer to it as 5Core the proper title was always spelled out, though 5C is fine as an abbreviation. 

FiveCore saw a rash of small expansions adding various things such as optional rules, some monsters and other such things. These were fairly popular and I was encouraged by positive emails I received from people. It became clear that something bigger and more comprehensive would be required in the future. 

I suppose it is fitting that the second game released under the Nordic Weasel Games branding was also the first spin off, as I have often found it fun to create new games out of the same game engine. It was also the dawn of NWG as a company that offers a lot of optional rules: With a game like this there was so many different ways that if you keep thinking about it, you will keep coming up with more things. Likewise some ideas were not suitable to the main book but deserved some time in the light of day. As such a collection of small expansions started appearing. 

It soon became clear that this really needed to be a much bigger book and thus, the need for a second edition arose. *Ominous music*