Review: Napoleon Returns, 1815

 

 

I’ve recently returned to Denis Sauvage’s Conquerors series and we’re a couple of games now into Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020). It’s a rich experience, and a refinement in some ways of its predecessor, Napoléon 1806 (Shakos, 1017 – reviewed here). This has got me thinking about another Napoleonic game with similar parameters – wooden playing-pieces, point-to-point movement, and off-board cohesion recording – but played out very differently in movement and combat.

Napoleon Returns, 1815 (Worthington Publishing, 2020), shares points of similarity with the Shakos Napoléon games – point-to-point movement, corps-level units, and card-driven combat resolution – and to a degree it plays out in a similar fashion. There’s a cat-and-mouse quality reminiscent of Napoleon 1806; trying to run down the fifteen-turn clock while preventing the French forces from achieving their goals is a valid strategy, but it’s made more difficult by the Allies’ uncertainty over what those goals actually are.

I should say up front that Napoleon Returns has been out of print for a couple of year now, I think, but if it sparks your interest, there are usually a few copies to be found on BoardGameGeek.com and eBay. I always feel a little guilty reviewing something that’ll prove difficult to find new, but this is a gem of a game that doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and I really wanted to make a case for it.

A pic of the game board from Worthington Publishing (I couldn't get
the lighting right to do it justice).

 

Appearance

The Napoleon Returns board is a simple, elegant parchment monochrome against which the unit blocks really stand out. The map guides point-to-point movement and represents the area of northern France and lower Belgium, from Ghent, Antwerp and Mäestricht in the north to Condé, Beaumont and Rochefort in the south. The dense Ardennes Forest is marked out by a smattering of trees, and the blue-grey rivers of the region are etched across the map in a blue-grey wash. The board also features tracks for marking the current turn, movement point allowances for the three factions, and a weather gauge (fair or raining, established at the beginning of each turn by a die-roll).

Opening set-up (historical), with the French forces massing at the border.

The pieces are simple blocks similar to those found in Tarawa 1943 (Worthington Publishing, 2021), except that, rather than needing to apply labels, the information has been stencilled directly on to the pieces. The information in question is minimal; each block represents an infantry corps or cavalry unit (one each for the French and British) of its national army, or one of the three leaders represented (Wellington, Blucher, and, of course, Napoleon). The French units are represented in a uniform blue, the Anglo-Alliance in the red of the British lobster coats, and the Prussians in a suitably dark grey. The units are marked only with their name, as all the relevant information is featured on separate mounted boards – two for the French, one each for the Anglo-Alliance and Prussians – which offer the combat value of the units at full and diminished strength, and a track to record each unit’s current “cohesion” (a number representing a combination of losses in dead and wounded, morale, and overall battle-weariness of the formation. The changing details on the map-board and players’ army boards are recorded with yellow cubes which stand out laudably on all the play surfaces.

Wellington and his Reserve Corps attending balls in Brussels before everything kicks off.

Play

Each block represents a Corps present during the final weeks of the Hundred Days campaign. The historical set-up places all the units on the board at start; the French units begin just inside the French border, with the Anglo-Alliance centred in the north-west, in the vicinity of Brussels and Lille, and the Prussians to the east. Movement is point-to-point, and each faction has a set number of Movement Points (MP), plus a die roll resulting in an extra point or more each turn. starting with the French, each faction in turn rolls a die to see how many MPs they have to use that turn, then proceed to move their units. A corps unit can move from one town to an adjacent, linked town at the cost of one MP, but have the option of moving a second time at the cost of another MP plus the loss of one cohesion point. This wouldn’t be something one does lightly, but in the last round or two it may decide a close game. At the beginning of each turn, a player rolls for the weather; on a 6, rain prevents the forced march option. Cavalry can move two locations for the cost of a single movement point.

The standard game has a historical set-up (there’s a placement guide on the reverse of both player’s aids). The rules allow for an optional free set-up by the French player (so long as all the formations start within the French border). This was probably included as a nod to those wanting a sense of greater player agency in their games, but I couldn’t think of a better way to telegraph your intentions to your opponent that to try to gain a traverse or two’s distance advantage before the game begins.

Detail of the North-East corner of the map. The Anglo-Allied army has just
completed their movement, and the Prussian player has rolled a 2 on his
die-roll for bonus movement points, giving him and single extra point.

Combat takes place when one side moves into a location already occupied by an opposing unit, and is handled through a card-matching mechanic similar to Mark Simonitch’s Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage (Avalon Hill, 1996). The players calculate the number cards collectively brought to the battle by their participating units, then draw that number of cards from the freshly shuffled deck (the whole deck should be reshuffled after each round of combat; in practice we’ve usually played through two or three combats before reshuffling, about ‘til the deck is half played through, to add a bit more tension with the card counting). Starting with the active (attacking) player, each player takes turns playing cards. The Defender has to match the card played with either an identical card, or a Combined Arms card (a wild card that will match any other card played), or withdraw from the battle (retreat). If the attacking unit(s) run out of cards, or if they choose to cease the attack, they must withdraw. Nobody comes off a battle unscathed. The retreating force takes a total of cohesion points off the involved formations equal to the number of rounds played, along with one cohesion point taken off each retreating unit as a retreat penalty (harassment from pursuing cavalry or eager Light troops), while the victor takes a cohesion hit equivalent to half the number of rounds played in combat (rounded down).

Sample battle cards.

Some cards have their own special powers; if battle finishes with a Skirmish or Cavalry Charge card played, the loser of the battle will take one less or one more point of cohesion loss respectively, while an attacker who plays a Counter Attack card, hoping their opponent isn’t holding one may see their roles reversed and find themselves on the defensive if it is matched with a another Counter Attack. The action is simple, and there a bigger hand may give you more options for play, but it is fast and dynamic, and a player who isn’t confident in the hand they’ve been dealt can retreat in the first round of battle to preserve their forces.

The onus is on the French aggressors to win the contest. If the French player fails to meet the parameters of victory, the game defaults to the Allies. Before the start, the French player takes two Objective cards at random from a set of five. The objective cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, and Liege. The fifth objective is the elimination of three of the Allies corps regardless of nationality. The Allied player(s) have no knowledge of the French objectives at the beginning of the game, though with only fifteen turns in which to achieve both, the French player’s actions will probably hint at them by four or five turns into the game. Beyond the French victory requirements, if either side eliminates four of the enemy’s corps, they win a sudden death victory.

Napoleon's Grande Armée prepares to cross into Belgium.

Appraisal

While preparing this review, I had a look at BoardGameGeek.com to see what other people have said about Napoleon Returns. BGG allows users to put their own ratings on the games they own (a score out of ten), then aggregates these into an average. At time of writing, the average for Napoleon Returns was a little below 7.5, based on 156 ratings (177 people have the game listed as “Own” or “Previously owned”). When you look at the individual ratings, though, things get a little squirrelly. Of the personal ratings of 8 or higher, 59 offered no comment at all on the game (even those with very specific ratings like 8.6 or 9.2).

Many comments from those who rated the game middlingly (5-6) insist on making a comparison with the Columbia block game, Napoleon: the Waterloo Campaign (Gamma Two Games / Avalon Hill / Columbia Games, 1974), usually negatively, but that isn’t quite fair, because the Columbia has been through four editions and three significant re-designs concerning the number of units on the board, but it’s fundamentally a divisional-scale game, which is why the first edition, with the lowest unit count, still had two-and-a-half times number of pieces as the corps-based Napoleon Returns, The only similarities are the  movement, the use of wooden components, and of course, the subject matter. I think some people confuse having more pieces on the board with having greater greater player agency when it’s really just a preference of scale. Some people who rated the game very low said that Worthington had failed in creating an introductory-level wargame for people new to the hobby, but didn’t elaborate. I personally find it easy to dismiss this kind of out-of-hand rejection; it always feels like somebody bought the game without doing any due diligence – like reading the back of the box – then got all bent out of shape because it wasn’t what they assumed it would be on reading the title (or didn't notice the point-to-point movement map).

Sometimes large formations are unavoidable. A retreating force must by preference
move toa location where an allied corps is already located, if one is nearby. If not,
any free space will do. In this case, successful French actions at Soignies and
Nivelles forced the British Second Corps and Cavalry respectively to retreat
to Braine le Comte, joining up with the First and Reserve. (Blucher is on top
of his First Corps in order to get a better view.)

For my money, Napoleon Returns is a short, tense, and satisfying game experience. the tension between the need to exercise force preservation and the requirement to engage the enemy makes for deliciously frustrating hour or so of play. I can appreciate criticisms of luck playing too large a art in combat resolution, but, at the same time, Napoleon himself said he’d rather have a lucky general than a skilled one. If you’ve been dealt a bad hand, you don’t have to fight to the bitter end. All the better if your opponent opens with a Skirmish battle card, where you can walk away with just the one cohesion point Retreat penalty and live to fight (or evade) another day. It's a good game if you not someone who is invested in every single martial action.

Prussian cohesion after a couple of run-ins with the French. If the Second and Third Corps
take another hit each, they'll drop in combat effectiveness from three cards to two.

Another criticism levelled at the game is that there is no incentive to not form big stacks in order to draw huge hands of cards to smash you opponent. This to me smacks of a lack of tactical imagination. While there aren’t any rules against forming one massive block to pound your foes, that’s going to limit their ability to manoeuvre, and you simply can’t cover two location objectives with one formation. I’d add that I’ve seen a nine- or ten-card hand beaten more than once by a five-card hand because the short hand happened to include a couple each of Combined Arms and Counter Attack cards. It’s not something you can plan for, but when it comes off, it’s the one point all the players will be talking about after the game.

If I’m honest, it’s not a game I pull out often, but it’s not one I’m ready to part with either. I played it again a couple of times while writing this, and that experience made me wonder why I haven’t got it to the table it in the last couple of years. It shares a space with some of other games (like Hitler’s Reich: World War II in Europe (GMT Games, 2018), or Caesar! Seize Rome in Twenty Minutes! (PSC, 2022)) that offer a really taut and challenging experience when you simply don’t time for a three- or four-hour game. Napoleon Returns isn’t a game that offers an immersive, nuanced experience of the Waterloo campaign with a lot of detail and chrome, but it’s not trying to, either. While the combat is given over to a large degree to the fickleness of fortune, the rest of the game rewards thoughtful movement, blocking moves, feints, and parries. It’s a game you’re sure to lose if your only strategy is to pound the other guy. Napoleon Returns, 1815 insists you to be smarter than that.