Hey!
So, under the new game-buying regime, I only buy games when I know they'll make it to the table, and fill niches that need filling, or replace games that are already there. I've been on a bit of a game-buying spree, by my "new" standards; I bought the latest set of airplanes for Wings of War (not a game in and of itself, and I love the stuff), completed my set of Dungeoneer (which all link up, so it's a quasi-game, and anyway I love Dungeoneer to death), got Settlers of America (a near-guaranteed "player")...and I wanted one of the new Napoleonics games that are coming out.
With wargames on battles, I like games that can do a lot of battles, rather than just one. "Toyboxes," I call them, where you can take out the parts and put them together every which way. The only games on a single battle I own are for my beloved Battles of the American Revolution series. (Just got Pensacola: Yes!) On the other hand, I own several toyboxes--Memoir 44, Commands and Colors: Ancients, Ancient Battles Deluxe, Hold the Line, Infernal Machines, Battle Cry, Trenchfoot, Cry Havoc...lots. As the ludic cognoscenti are aware, we are about to be awash in Napoleonic toyboxes. There are three currently out, and a fourth on the way. I don't have anything that does Napoleonic battles--I don't count Manoeuvre--and I do have an interest in them, so it seemed reasonable to make room on the shelf for one of them. ONE of them. None of this buy-all-four nonsense, even if I "swear" to trade off three. I know my weaknesses. So, it came time to check the market.
I was originally drawn to the "official" one, Commands and Colors: Napoleonics, coming to us from GMT. Here's the thing, though. Straight-up C&C does best for linear action, which is why (until Breakthrough) it shone brightest for Ancients (the height of linearity, as it were) and the beach assault scenarios for M44. There was no coherent way to do Gettysburg, although some insane person tried once, with eighteen boards or some nonsense like that. If you look at Napoleonic battles, they're pretty square, rather than rectangular. Lefts and rights are relative, if existing at all. It's not really built for C&C treatment, I don't think.
(You know what is? Musket-and-pike era combat. C&C: Thirty Years War? That'd be awesome, for me and the six other people who would get it.)
So I looked elsewhere. The prettiest game with the most grandiose name is The Battles of Napoleon: The Eagle and the Lion. (Sorry for not linking to these; it takes an extra thirty seconds each and TIME is MONEY when you're blogging for free.) It's also the biggest box, and the most expensive. $100 straight up, unless you buy it online like everyone else. Much like all its competitors, it focuses on the French against the English.
(Does this strike anyone else as a Marketing Fail? I mean, OK, we've all heard of Waterloo, but isn't someone out there interested in Borodino? Austerlitz? Can't somebody be different, and separate themselves from the pack?)
It is awful pretty. Here's the thing though. For your Ben Franklin (plus tax), you get a bunch of English, a bunch of French, and no Waterloo scenario. OK, sure, there are clashes within Waterloo, but not the actual near-run-thing itself. Also, poking around I found a PDF of the rules to download and discovered that at
forty-seven pages long
they exceed my current rules-length tolerances considerably. I decided that this was $100 safely spent elsewhere.
What helped Gio Games's Vive l'Empereur Deluxe is that it's the underdog, and I'm a sucker for that. But I'm also a sucker for games that don't use cheesy cardboard stand-up soldiers on plastic chips. I'm a connoisseur.
Which brings us to Worthington Games' entrant, Napoleon's War. This had a lot going for it. It seemed like it would bring us new scenarios and armies the fastest, for one thing, and would include the War of 1812. I don't see Nexus and FFG bothering with Bladensburg for Battles of Napoleon. It's also a system I trust for the period. I have Hold the Line and its predecessors, and I find that they work pretty smoothly, especially for asymmetric sides. Very few unbalanced scenarios, game-wise. The rules are fairly simple, I'm pretty familiar with them, so I say go for it.
And go for it I did.
I read the rules, they seem nifty, I set up Waterloo, and as I'm doing so the problems start to mount. These are small hexes, and packing five or six miniatures in there with a counter or two is a bit of a tight fit. But really, the problem is the overall size. Waterloo, when you stand back and look at it set up, is a small battle. And it shouldn't be small. It should be epic. It should have more than sixteen units a side, scrunched up in the middle of the map. It's a small physical space.
The beauty of C&C:Ancients and M44 is the almost operatic quality the games take on when you really get everything spread out, and you have elephants and archers and Panther tanks and cataphracted camels and Russian hordes and God knows what else going almost six feet wide, squaring off against each other in three dimensions and there's a real, serious tension before the first card is played, as the units' potential energy is straining, waiting to be released in a massive battle.
You don't really get that here.
And, for the first few games in the series, that's OK. I mean, the battles of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution just aren't very big battles. Germantown can be cozy. Waterloo needs to be big. Borodino needs to be big. Austerlitz needs to be big. Wavre can probably be a little smaller, along with most of the Spanish battles.
Let me be clear, too, that having played through this, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. These are good rules. It's a shame that the maps are one-offs; I'd prefer a blank map with tiles to strew over it. (But really I'd prefer bigger hexes; these things are just tiny.) I'm eagerly awaiting the next releases in the system...I just wish there was an Epic Napoleon's War to go along with the rest of it.
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