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What's (Not?) Been Happening Lately in Terms of the Game and the Series
The folks at GMT are generally quite accessible. While I was working on my review of The Battles of Waterloo for Fire and
Movement magazine back in 1994 or 1995, I saw Gene Billingsley, GMT's head
honcho, at an LA-area game convention. I told him that I thought the game was a lot
of fun but weighted down by bad rules. He said, quite undefensively, that I wasn't
the first person to have that opinion, and that GMT planned to revise the rules
extensively in connection with its second game in the Napoleonics series, which (if I
remember correctly) was to be a game on the battle of Wagram.
I saw Gene several months later and asked him how things were going with the rules
revision. He said that a particular person, whom he named, had agreed to take on the
task of redrafting the rules for The Battles of Waterloo. Since then, some
things have happened and some things have not.
The affirmative developments from GMT since then are:
 | GMT has issued some official errata. |
| GMT generously included some replacement cavalry counters in C3I no.
4, which bears a cover date of 1994. (C3I is GMT's house organ.
GMT describes C3I
at its Web site, including a complete collection of its ever-handsome covers.)
The obverse of each replacement counter has a horse's-head icon on the back to
allow you easily to distinguish them from other combat arms when step-reduced, a
distinction that you could previously make only by looking at the (fine-print) unit
designation. {You may buy these replacement counters (as part of a countersheet
including redesigned or supplemental counters for other GMT games) at GMT's Order page or call them at
(800)-523-6111.} |
| A page at the GMT Web
site includes "living rules" for the game as well as some charts, all
provided by Bill Ramsay. (Bill is not the
person whom Gene initially mentioned as the potential rules-reviser, although I don't draw
any particular inference from that in light of the tentativeness with which Gene initially
described the revision effort and the generally shoe-stringed nature of our hobby.) |
These developments are in some ways disappointing, however:
| The official errata are now more than four years old, are rather scanty even as errata,
and in any case don't go very far towards addressing the more fundamental difficulties
with the rules. (I have obtained some additional,
semi-official errata, courtesy of game designer Richard Berg and game developer Gene
Billingsley.) |
| C3I has
devoted very little coverage to the game except for the replacement cavalry counters
and an article in issue 9 on modifying the Dutch-Belgian values in light of recent
scholarship on the topic. One might hope for a scenario or two (the fighting
around Hougomont, for example, might make a nice, small scenario) or an analysis of the
system (the game's tactical intricacies certainly imply that analysis would be useful). |
| The "living rules" for the game do not in their text indicate how they are
different from the original version. (Gene Billingsley and Bill Ramsay have both
e-mailed me, however, with useful information on how the
"living rules" differ from the original rules.) |
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The Battles of Waterloo
remains the only game in GMT's "Napoleonic Series. "
(Wagram, the battle initially
slated to be the subject of a next game in the series, is
one of the sub-games in
Triumph and Glory, but
Triumph and Glory is part of the much simpler,
multi-period "Gameplayers Series. " {For GMT's general listing
of its series and the games within them, see the "Games" page on the GMT
site.}) GMT also has a "Great Battles of the Napoleonic Wars"
series, which has one game in it:
Austerlitz 1805. That
game uses a different, more detailed scale for map and units than
does Battles, however, and presumably uses a different
rules system.)
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