An Excerpt from "Waterloo Moods"

You could practically frame the front box art, with its gorgeous red-to-yellow background and its triptych of Napoleonic icons: Napoleon himself in the center, flanked on one side by Detaille's image of a gleaming stalwart of the Old Guard infantry and on the other by a dashing dragoon. If I did frame the box, I would put it in the same gallery as the Warhols and Rauschenbergs: the iconography of Pop Art. Just as Rauschenberg subtly changed and simplified RAT-A-TAT-TAT! and other comic-book frames that he copied, Rodger MacGowan's box subtly brightens and simplifies the central icon of military art that he has chosen for his front cover. The original, by Delaroche, depicts a glowering Napoleon, deep in shadow, lit only by fading light from a window and perhaps by a fire: gray eyes in the shadows, a Grey greatcoat, black boots. MacGowan’s version is Napoleon in a flash photograph: a brilliant white waistcoat, bright blue eyes, and an aqua-blue greatcoat. Delaroche's background moves from purple-black to pure black; MacGowan’s background from light to dark purple. I should note that we have the strongest possible evidence that MacGowan chose this brighter Napoleon deliberately: he has also done a version of this very same painting for Avalon Hill's The Struggle of Nations that is much darker. On the Avalon Hill box, Napoleon's eyes are black, and his greatcoat looks almost like a piece of carved charcoal. Tellingly, the soldiers sharing the box are no parade-ground dandies but a wonderfully evocative mass of weary grognards--even their dog [in the lower right-hand corner of the cover] is so bone-tired that it too shuffles along, stoop-shouldered.

The choice of colors for some of the unit identifications on the counters display the same peppy Modernism: orange for the French II Corps, bright blueberry for the French III Corps, grape for the French IV Corps, and a cool yellow for the French II Cavalry Corps. The trio of horses on a Recovered marker are black shadows galloping out of a white background like some ultra-high contrast Bergman trick, and the markers for Disorder and Rout are so stylishly functional that they could only be from the less-is-more 20th century.

As with the box art, the counters hit what I assume to be MacGowan's mark: dazzling. The pictographs are detailed and stylish. One can pick out the top of the plume on the cavalrymen, the back-packs of the infantry, and wheel hubs on the artillery pieces. Each army has its stunning flag on every counter: a reversed version of the Iron Cross for the Prussians, a diagonal blue-white-blue pennant for the Anglo-Allies, and the tricolor for the French. An exception to the tricolor's employment is made for the Imperial Guard, whose special treatment on the box art carries through to their very own counter design: a deep blue background with yellow lettering, and a flag based not on the tricolor's rectangles but the diamond-design battle standards of La Grande Armée. Taken as a whole, the game portrays the involved units not merely in the clear sunshine of a clear mid-morning, but in that light as brilliantly reflected off neat arrays of polished bayonets and cuirassiers.