The Battles of Waterloo

{Data Box}

Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington. Richard Berg. Rodger MacGowan. These are familiar names to any wargamer. The Battles of Waterloo brings them all together for the first time in GMT’s four-battle treatment of Napoleon’s final campaign. The result is an ambitious game with many strengths: flashy graphics, innovative rules, careful attention to history, and a well-chosen scale and scope. The game is also an enormous pain to learn how to play. If you slog through all the muddy counter-marches of the rules, however, you will—eventually—find yourself immersed in an eminently historical simulation of Napoleon’s last battles.

"One has but a short time for war."—Napoleon

After his exile to the cramped Mediterranean island of Elba in 1814, Napoleon returned to French soil on March 1st, 1815. Shortly thereafter, he had chased the restored Bourbons out of France by sheer reputation, but foreign enemies had once more pledged themselves to his downfall. By June of 1815, the Duke of Wellington had gathered in the general vicinity of Brussels a polyglot force of Englishmen, Scots, Hanoverians, Brunswickers, Dutchmen, and Belgians. A Prussian army, under the aged if irrepressible Field Marshal Blücher, occupied the gently rolling Belgian countryside to the east. Far away, Austrian and Russian forces lumbered towards France.

Keeping control of a central reserve, Napoleon divided the rest of his army into two wings, with Ney commanding on the left and Grouchy the right. On June 15th, he marched northwards into Belgium. On June 16th, Ney fought Wellington to a draw at Quatre Bras, and Napoleon used the French right wing and central reserve to win a bloody victory over the Prussian near Ligny. On the next day, the Prussians and British retreated more rapidly than the French could pursue them. By the morning of the 18th, Napoleon, thinking the Prussians whipped, moved his reserve from the right to the left for a climactic confrontation with Wellington a few miles south of Waterloo. Near Wavre, Grouchy fought a desultory action, neither keeping the bulk of the Prussian Army from joining Wellington nor marching to his Emperor’s aid. Near the village of Mont Saint Jean, the British held firm against the French onslaught, and the Prussians came streaming onto Napoleon’s flank. In his final throw of the dice, Napoleon ordered an attack of the Old Guard. But the Guard retreated under a withering cross-fire, and the French army collapsed. His "short time for war" had expired: he abdicated once more and began a permanent exile on the pile of South Atlantic rocks called Saint Helena.

Scope and Scale

Cavalry and infantry units are brigades for the French, and regiments for the Prussian and Anglo-Allied forces. The average cavalry unit represents about 800 horsemen; the average infantry unit about 2100 muskets. Some units represent as few as 200, or as many as 4200, men. The average French or Anglo-Allied artillery unit represents about a dozen guns; the average Prussian artillery counter contains over 20 barrels. Some artillery units represent as few as 6, or as many as 30, guns.

Out of the Box

The unit counters, by Rodger MacGowan, are colorful and detailed, with an army flag, a pictograph, and a color scheme identifying a unit’s corps (for French and Prussians) or division and nationality (for the Anglo-Allies). The pictographs are of high resolution indeed: you can see the packs, and even the shako plumes, of the infantrymen! The reverse of the units shows reduced ratings for numerical strength (and sometimes for other ratings). In addition to combat units, the counters include both leaders and markers. A stripe along the top of the counter designates the unit’s "command," an aggregation of units important for various rules in the game and roughly equivalent to a corps. (Oddly, and a bit annoyingly, the British units’ counters lack a stripe to designate their command.)

Amidst all the dazzle on the combat units are four numbers. For infantry and artillery units, these digits represent numerical strength, unit cohesion, commitment (representing the unit’s willingness to engage in close combat), and movement allowance. For cavalry, the unit cohesion and commitment ratings are represented by a single number, and a pursuit rating (estimating a unit’s willingness to rush on after an initial charge, usually to a place where angels would fear to tread) is added to the mix.

I find the unit counters a bit much, but my bias is towards conveying information efficiently. The fancy pictures and flags add nothing that isn’t already conveyed elsewhere on the counter. Furthermore, the aggregate effect of all those glossy, multi-colored counters on a map—even maps as subtle as those here—becomes visually fatiguing. And a Battles scenario is typically a lengthy and intense affair, so you’re likely to be doing—or at least attempting—a lot of staring. If you just like to look at the counters one at a time, however, I can assure you that you’ll be overjoyed at their flair and attention to detail.

A 32-page "Rulebook" contains the rules common to all battles, scattered all-text examples of play, and an extremely necessary index. The 16-page "Scenario Book" contains rules specific to some sub-set of the scenarios, the orders of battle, the victory conditions, and a bibliography. A lavish but not wasteful supply of cardstock charts and tables is included.

Into the Fray

Combat, Cohesion, Facing, Formation, Stacking, and Movement

Combat results are in terms of unit cohesion or step losses. The loss of cohesion can lead to difficulties in firing, in controlling your retreats, and (for infantry) in forming square. Most units have four steps, with a unit’s effective strength changing only after two step losses (making the unit "reduced") or four step losses (when the unit disappears). It is a rare combat result that leads to the loss of more than one step. In the short run, therefore, it is problems with cohesion that bedevil players.

In the longer run, of course, you must also worry about step losses, or your army will disappear. This is especially true in light of the fact that a "command" (typically a corps) with half or more of its non-artillery units in a reduced or routed state becomes "shaken," which dramatically reduces their ability to attack. A command with all non-artillery units in an afflicted state is "shattered," which dramatically reduces their ability to do everything except run away. (There is a slight oddity in this aspect of the rules. Destroyed units count the same as reduced units for purposes of determining the morale of a corps, so killing off completely an already-reduced unit has no impact on the morale of a corps. This tends to make a hard-hit unit an excellent choice for your shock troops, which seems a bit perverse to me.)

Facing is important in combat but rarely has any effect on movement. Formations are typically a matter of concern only to infantry units, with impacts upon combat and movement that will be familiar to any tactician of the Napoleonic era. The default formation is not clearly line or column, but there are clearly formations for extended line, extended column, and square. (There is one oddity, however. A large unit in square is no more vulnerable to fire, and no less capable of projecting fire, than a large unit in the default formation.) There is a welter of special rules for cavalry charges and for the fortress-like chateaux scattered across each map. Elevation changes and other terrain effects are taken into account in both combat and movement.

As to movement, all infantry units have a movement allowance of "4"; all cavalry units have an allowance of "7"; and artillery’s basic allowance is either "6" or "7," depending on whether it’s foot or horse artillery, respectively. There is the usual interaction of movement allowance with a terrain effects chart, but that is hardly the end of the matter. A unit may choose only one type of movement in a given turn, however. I count at least seven different types of movement theoretically available to each combat unit, although the command rules often severely limit the types of movement actually available. The two most prominent factors differentiating the various types of movement are: (1) what multiple of your printed movement allowance is actually available?; and (2) how close can you move to the enemy? Unsurprisingly, these two factors are inversely related: the faster your choice of movement type allows you to go, the further away you must stay from the enemy.

"It is the man who matters in war, not men."—Napoleon

In the Pool. I live in Los Angeles. On a sunny day, the best place to be is in the pool. (The ocean is cold, polluted, and not actually patrolled by Pamela Denise Anderson or Yasmine Bleech.) In Battles, the best place to be is also "In the Pool." How do you get there? Well, every Army Leader (Napoleon, Wellington, or Blücher) has 2 or 3 "Command Points." For each Command Point that your Army Leader has, you can put one "LIM" in "the Pool." What’s a LIM and where is the Pool? A "LIM" is a "Leader Initiative Marker," i.e., a counter with some identifying marks on it, and "the Pool" is a (dry) coffee cup. Essentially, each "command" has a LIM, with corps-sized commands for the French and Prussians, and either a corps or division as the typical command for the Anglo-Allies. Each command also has its own "combat" leader, e.g., the corps commander for French units.

So long as the command’s combat leader is within the Army Leader’s command radius, the command’s LIM is eligible for placement in the Pool. Actually placing the LIM in the Pool requires the expenditure of a Command Point (CP). Because you almost always have many more commands than you have CPs, only some of your commands will move under their LIM. Finally, when you actually draw the LIM from the Pool during the Operations Phase, any units of the relevant command within the command radius of their combat leader can move and fight. When they’re done, you draw another LIM from the cup, and all in-command units of that command move and fight, and so forth, until you’ve drawn all LIMs placed in the Pool.

Since the LIMs in the Pool are to be placed in an opaque cup, you don’t know in what order the LIMs will come up—except that the Player with the Initiative, which is usually determined by a simple dice-rolling procedure, gets to choose one of his LIMs to play as the very first LIM. After that, it’s up to the Fickle Finger of Fate. You could draw all of your LIMs before any of your opponent’s LIMs come into play, or you could wind up alternating LIMs, or any other combination.

The payoff to units in a command with its LIM in the Pool is two-fold. First, such units move before units in commands that are not in the Pool. (Because the LIMs are drawn blindly, you don’t know exactly when your movement will occur during the Operations Phase, but you do know that you’ll move before No-LIM and out-of-command units.) Second, you get to move with more flexibility than units in a lesser command state. Units moving under their LIM, for example, can move into enemy zones of control; units not moving under their LIM either cannot enter an enemy zone of control or must make a die roll to do so.

Your ability to move units during the Operations Phase is improved a bit by the fact that each army has one "Orders" LIM, which goes in the Pool for free. This LIM, when drawn, allows you to choose one of three options: move all your leaders (and the only way to move Napoleon or Blücher), move any one unit regardless of its command state, or try to activate a no-LIM unit even though such units ordinarily can only be activated in the No-LIM Phase. Your mobility is occasionally improved by the fact that each army has available to it a "Strategic Movement" LIM, which costs a CP to put in the Pool, but which allows any in-command units in any command to undertake rapid ("Strategic") movement. Two other, special, artillery-related LIMs are available only to the French player: an "Artillery" LIM, which allows coordination of the movement and fire of artillery units across commands, and the "Grand Battery" LIM, which allows very effective artillery fire, but no movement, across commands.

No LIM. If a combat unit is within the command radius of its combat leader, but did not have its LIM placed in the Pool through the expenditure of the Army Commander’s Command Points, then the unit will move during the No LIM phase, which immediately follows the Operations Phase. Players alternate picking one command at a time, with the player with the Initiative going first, until they have acted with respect to all no-LIM commands.

With respect to each no-LIM command, the owning player faces a choice as to the kind of movement that the command will undertake. Those who play it safe can opt for "Limited Activation," which allows for more movement and combat than out-of-command units, but less movement and combat than is allowed a unit "In the Pool." Those who like to gamble can roll against the relevant combat leader’s "Orders Rating" (a number that is usually a 2 or 3 for infantry units, and a 5 or 6 for cavalry units, with the roll made on a ten-sided die). If you roll less than your Orders Rating, then your command moves with all the flexibility that would have been yours if you had placed the command’s LIM "In the Pool" (except, of course, that you’re moving in the No-LIM Phase, not the Operations Phase). If you roll higher than your Orders Rating, however, then your command can do absolutely nothing. No movement, no combat, not even rallying attempts. Nothing.

Out of Command. The third phase in which movement occurs is for units that are "out of command," which is the command state of a combat unit not within the command radius of its combat leader. An out-of-command unit moves not only later but also more slowly than an in-command unit. In addition, out-of-command units are essentially prohibited from engaging in combat.

There’s a lot to like in this game. There are also a few things that should disappoint any purchaser, and a few things that disappointed me but might not bother you.

Three Things To Like

Value. The $40 price tag for the game seems justified. Each battle is treated with at least one 22" x 34" map, so in a way, you’re just paying $10 per game. (Heck, Clash of Arms charges $40 for its expansion set on the Waterloo battlefield, which contains four single-sided maps, some rules, and no counters.) In addition, this is no colorless quad-style game leveling four different battles into a numbingly familiar parade of mini-games. Each game within Battles has its own flavor. Quatre Bras varies wildly from playing to playing like the creations of a drunken but brilliant chef; Ligny is as solid and reliable as your favorite burger joint; Wavre is an abstract little affair, like a piece of all-veggie dim sum; and Mont-St. Jean has the sweep and density of a five-course French meal. Overall, there are a lot of counters, a lot of maps, a lot of rules, and a lot of charts.

Historicity. In three different ways, Battles seems to display unusual fidelity to the historical events that it treats. First, the game has a lot of chrome reflecting the Napoleonic era generally and the battles of Waterloo particularly. In addition to the welter of combat modifiers mentioned earlier—not to mention the evocative if slightly dazzle-happy counters—there are rules reflecting Napoleon’s varying health and wakefulness; the two-wing command structure of the French; the convoluted, tightly controlled command structure of the Anglo-Allies; the nearly perfect symmetries of Prussian organization; the independence granted to the French all-cavalry corps; the lack of independence granted to the French Imperial Guard; the special talents of Blücher, Wellington, Ney in close combat; and Grouchy’s and Uxbridge’s facility with cavalry. And that’s just the relevant chrome from the command-oriented rules. There are also rules reflecting the difficulty of controlling cavalry and the ease of manning chateau defenses, the effects of mud and rain, the difficulty of distinguishing French from Prussian reinforcements at a distance, and the possibility that one or another French corps would have made it to a battlefield from which it was absent historically.

Second, the game seems historically authentic in the outcomes that occur when a player mimics historical operations. With my trusty copy of David Chandler’s Campaigns of Napoleon in hand, I tried to follow historical attack times and corps sectors as closely as possible in a solitaire run-through of both the Ligny and the Mont-St. Jean scenarios. In the Ligny scenario, I encountered the same see-saw battles over the village hexes that occurred in history, the same relative ease in holding off the Prussian left wing exclusively with French cavalry, the crumbling of Prussian resistance at about the same time that it actually occurred, and the same inability of the French to exact a decisive victory. In the Mont-St. Jean scenario, I encountered the same relative ineffectiveness of grand-battery fire against British units on the reverse slope of a ridge (and the same great success against exposed units), the same all-day difficulty in wresting Hougomont from the British with the French II Corps, and even the same just-fall-short attack by the Imperial Guard after the French right finally began to crumble in the face of the Prussian attack. (I couldn’t actually bring myself to replicate Ney’s massed, unsupported cavalry charges against the British, but I’m sure that the rules would have led to their failure in the game, just as such charges failed in history.) In both cases, the capture of various geographic objectives and the morale difficulties of various commands worked out within 40 minutes or so of when they did historically. The rules and unit factors therefore seem commendably well-tuned approximations of historical events.

Third, and in some ways most praiseworthy, the game seems historically authentic in the frame of mind that it encourages in its players. Two aspects of the game are crucial in this respect: commands and cohesion. Because you move units by command, you definitely come to consider your force to consist of commands rather than of units. Because there are never enough Command Points to move all your commands, you have to set priorities. You must choose a few commands as the focus of an attack, and you need to hew to that priority for some time if your attack is going to produce results. As a result of the game’s focus on commands, you find yourself developing plans much in the way that an army commander seemed to develop plans during this era—a corps or two at a time. The fact that one never knows just which LIM will come next also allows for those oft-described moments when plans mean little: occasionally, for example, two opposing commands will each present a vulnerable flank, and whichever LIM is drawn first will allow the unit moving first to exploit that vulnerability and triumph over the other.

The focus of the combat system on cohesion also encourages an historically accurate frame of mind in the players. Units in good order are difficult to dislodge (unless there is a very large differential in favor of the size or cohesion of the attacking units). Units in poor order, in contrast, are at a great disadvantage. This encourages players to focus upon preparatory artillery fire, which allows you to inflict disorder on the enemy while suffering little yourself, or upon cavalry charges against disordered units, which allows you to reap great benefits once the poor order of the defender hinders his forming square or firing against your horsemen. The gradual way in which units tend to accumulate disorder, sometimes interrupted by rallies, gives a sense of ebb and flow to the game. Your shiny counters march up in perfect order. They, and their opponents, begin to accumulate "D1" counters as a few turns pass. The side with better cohesion ratings accumulates not quite so many such markers, or is able more rapidly to throw them off with rallies. The "D2" and "Blown" markers begin to accumulate, and then they turn to routs, and then one side has fewer units to hold the line and so begins to suffer even more—and so on. A well-timed charge of fresh cavalry can tip the balance decisively at this point, or perhaps one command has a fresh unit or two to heave into the struggle. And the evolution of a line from perfect order to ragged chaos all happens gradually, naturally—rarely because of any single factor, whether luck, tactics, or combat ratings, but almost always because of a subtle set of interactions among all three.

Some Things To Dislike

There are also a lot of rules with exceptions that seem very narrow. You round odds for shock combat down—except when the attacker has moved and the defender is receiving no terrain benefits, in which case you round up. No two infantry units may stack together—except when one of them is the Prussians’ Silesian Rifles unit and the other is from the 3rd Division of the relevant corps. Heavy cavalry in shock combat against light cavalry receives a favorable DRM—except when the light cavalry is the defender and rolls a "counter-charge" on the "Charge Reaction Table." An Army Commander may only move under the Orders LIM—except when it’s Wellington moving under the "Army Reserve" LIM. In the No-LIM Phase, you roll against the Orders Rating printed on the Combat Leader’s counter when attempting Activation—except when it’s the command for which Wellington is the Combat Leader, in which case the Rating is "9" (per the errata), or when it’s the infantry units of the French Imperial Guard, in which case Activation attempts are barred. (Oddly, the Guard infantry’s combat leader nonetheless has a non-zero Orders Rating, even though activation is the only function of the Orders Rating for combat leaders.)

More subtle, but in the end more of a barrier to enjoying the game, is the sense that the concepts behind the rules are somehow "out of register." What do I mean by that? If your local newspaper has color photos, you’ve probably had the experience of seeing those annoying overlapping of the different colors caused when the plates are printed slightly out of register. As a result, you can hardly make out the photo. Battles is no stranger to a similar phenomenon. The rules don’t just contain a bunch of exceptions—they contain concept after concept expressed in an overlapping way that makes it very difficult to focus on just what the designer is apparently trying to tell you.

Take the way that you use the LIM system in the four different battles. In the Mont-St. Jean battle, you use the LIMs just the way that the rulebook sets them forth. In Ligny, you have almost exactly the same set of rules, except that you don’t use the "Grand Battery" LIM. In Wavre, you’re suddenly seriously out of register, because the scenario tells you to use LIMs "as per the rules"—even though the Wavre scenario is the only one without an Army Commander, whose counter tells you how many LIMs you can put in the Pool. In Quatre Bras, the scenario book sets forth what is essentially a completely different set of rules on LIMs from those set forth in the scenario book, and you will use several LIMs that appear in no other scenario. The LIM system is in some ways the core of the game, and the four battles covered in the game all occurred over a space of just three days. Yet you pretty much have to learn three different, if overlapping, versions of the command rules to play the four scenarios in the game. (The scenario book, by the way, tells you that Quatre Bras is a "good scenario with which to learn most of the basics of the game," even though the scenario book’s rules in fact require you to unlearn almost everything about the basics of command and sequence of play that you laboriously puzzled out in the main rules booklet!)

I could multiply the examples of these out-of-register phenomena at some length. All named, all-arms leaders fall into one of three categories—Army Commander, Superior Commander, and Combat Leader—but at least one leader in every category (though never all such leaders) can in fact perform at least one (but never all) of the functions of some different kind of leader. The "Operations Phase" is generally for units moving under their LIM, and the "No LIM Phase" is generally for the (possible) movement of units not moving under their LIM, except that a "No LIM" unit can move in the Operations Phase if the Orders LIM is drawn and you roll less than the Orders Rating of the command’s combat leader. Almost every LIM corresponds to exactly one command, but the French Cavalry Reserve LIM activates all the in-command units of four commands, the Anglo-Allied Army Reserve LIM activates two commands, the Strategic Movement LIM activates a varying number of in-command units in a varying number of commands, and the Orders LIM may activate one unit automatically or one command on a die roll or every leader. All units suffer "D1" as their first disorder result and "rout" as their final disorder result, but the intermediate result differs among infantry ("D2"), artillery (no intermediate result), and cavalry (two different "intermediate" results, with one depending on a die roll against the unit’s cohesion rating and resulting in an extra retreat, and the other, a "blown" status, not dependent on a die roll). There are different procedures for removing the various intermediate results.

Even a simple matter like finding a combat unit’s "commitment rating" on its counter falls prey to this out-of-register phenomenon. For infantry, the commitment rating is in the upper right-hand corner of the counter. For light cavalry, that rating is in the lower left-hand corner of the counter. For heavy cavalry, the commitment rating number doesn’t appear anywhere on the counter, but is always a "9" (the highest possible). Like heavy cavalry, artillery doesn’t have a printed commitment rating at all, but its commitment rating is effectively "0" (the lowest possible). So rules like "it’s in the same place for everyone" or "it’s in the lower left-hand corner for cavalry" or "it’s not on the counter for cavalry" or "it’s ‘9’ if it’s not on the counter" are all incorrect. There’s no natural way to remember the rule except by remembering four sub-rules, and each sub-rule overlaps, a little out of register, with the other sub-rules.

The upshot of this lack of registration is that the game is quite hard to learn—and would be quite hard to learn even if the rules were perfectly organized and stripped of their pervasive exceptions. The rules are also very hard to explain to someone else, even after you’ve slogged through the rulebook and think you understand the concepts yourself, because you can’t draw a ready analogy or easily figure out what to explain in what order. Every set of concepts slithers in and out of every other set of concepts. It’s as if a couple of smart people read a bunch of stuff about Waterloo, got very excited one night about coming up with a rule to reflect every cool thing that happened, came up with concepts for the first few events that they thought of, grafted other events onto roughly the same set of initial concepts, and then called it a game.

A Couple of Things That May or May Not Bother You

This is also a game where I would have been quite grateful for some developer’s notes. With a game involving some new systems, I always appreciate the developer’s perspective on how the game actually plays in experienced hands. I also wonder what was added or omitted between the submission of this design and its final form. Were there once DRMs reflecting Picton’s top hat or the fact that Ney had four horses shot out from under him without himself suffering a scratch? Did the developer somehow make the rules more confusing?

Shifting Roles. Although you allegedly take the role of the army commander in this game, you do make a lot of decisions about formation and march order that seem inappropriately detailed for that role. Wellington told troops to lie down when he rode over them, and he placed his units quite carefully at the beginning of a battle, but during the battle he essentially allocated reserves and waved his hat for the general counter-charge after the failure of the Imperial Guard’s attack. Napoleon, who in his younger days sometimes sited his artillery pieces personally, left the whole show to Ney. Both Ney and Blücher tended to get so involved in leading from the front that they lost control of any number of grand-tactical, let alone tactical, decisions that they might have made. Lots of wargames give a player decisions to make that are several levels below the highest-ranking role that he plays, however, so Battles is hardly unique in this respect. Also, lots of people think want this sort of role-jumping in the name of "realism."

Playing Time. Don’t be surprised if a turn of the Mont-St. Jean or Ligny scenario takes well over 90 minutes of actual time to represent its 30 minutes of historical time. (Quatre Bras and Wavre move more quickly, at least once you’ve figured out how the command rules work in Quatre Bras.) With experience, things will speed up somewhat—if you can memorize the most prominent exceptions to the rules and some of the most crucial DRMs. The assault-resolution procedure will always have more than a dozen steps, however, and a wealth of various procedures will always require the calculation of many a DRM.

The Bottom Line, Extended Line, Column, Extended Column, or Square