Not Created Equal: a Block Wargame Primer, Part 1 – Commands & Colors

  

 

Note: this was originally going to be a single post about various types of block wargames. But as sometimes happens, the further down the rabbit-hole I went, the more I found I had to add. Rather than try to trim it down excessively, I’m going to write this as a short series.

I know Commands & Colors is an odd place to start, but of all the block wargames available, it’s the one I have the most familiarity with, so it seemed like a good launchpad.

I don’t have a schedule for this series, but I anticipate maybe one post a month or so  until I run out of things to talk about.

C&C: Napoleonics - EPIC Napoleonics: Austerlitz

This post – or post-series – was prompted by a comment on Facebook. When I posted my first Ten Game Challenge AAR on the Tac-UP group, Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020), a fellow group member commented that the game looked interesting and mentioned that they had never played a block game. This got me to thinking about block games and their place in the hobby.

The term “Block wargame” seems to conjure different pictures for different people; everyone can agree that Columbia’s Julius Caesar (Columbia Games, 2010) and Hammer of the Scots (Columbia Games, 2002) are definitely block games, but can the same be said for Churchill (GMT Games, 2015). Are games from the Commands & Colors family block games? Wooden blocks make up nearly all the moving parts of the game, but they don’t function like the blocks in a traditional block game, like Julius Caesar. And then there’s Atlantic Chase (GMT Games, 2021).

 

Setting the parameters

For the sake of this rabbit-hole-dive, I’m going to cast the net particularly wide, taking in pretty much anything that uses wooden blocks within the game’s parameters. From the get-go, I should also define what I mean by blocks. I’ll be specifically looking at games that use wooden pieces to convey meaning beyond the merely being a marker for a presence (like the Control discs in WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020), or numerical superiority (as in COIN games, or Academy Game’s Birth of America series). This isn’t a criticism or dismissal of these games – it’s just not what I’m interested in here. The wooden components in these instances could easily be replaced with punchboard counters or another kind of marker (like the little resin cubes in Pandemic (Z-Man Games, 2008)) without the game suffering any playability issues.

To try to head off some of the arguments at the pass, I’m going to apply a broad but simple definition of what I’ll go into here. For the sake of this discussion, a block game is a game that uses wooden components (regardless of precise shape) that present information further to their placement on the board. All the games for consideration will feature individual blocks as units or several blocks comprising units. The blocks tend to be of a uniform size, but not always. It is rather broad in scope, but I wanted the opportunity to talk about block games in their configurations and contrivances.

At this point, it may be useful to address what I won’t be considering in this post. I decided to disregard COIN Cames at the outset. This is not an indictment of COIN games – I’m not very good at them but I nonetheless enjoy playing them and even own a couple – but the information conveyed by the blocks in a COIN-system game is solely numerical and locational. After some deliberation, I decided to leave out Levy and Campaign games as well; There is more information conveyed by the colour and shape of the pieces, but it comes down to tiered numerical values.

I’m by no means an expert on the subject either. I‘ve played probably a couple-dozen block wargames of different stripes, but there are a lot I haven’t played, and still others I probably haven’t heard of (suggestions for future exploration welcome). This series isn’t meant to be an exhaustive survey of block wargames, or a cook’s tour of block games I have known. What I hope to present is a broad brushstroke look at what different styles of block game are trying to do and how they go about it, and maybe some thoughts abo what they’ve brought to the hobby and how they’ve influenced hex-and-counter games and vice-versa. I don’t expect anything earth-shattering to come out of this, but maybe a post will nudge a reader toward a type of game they haven’t tried before. As ever, comments, criticisms and recommendations are welcome.

 

C&C : Ancients: Marathon, BC490 - not going so welll for the Greeks.

Commands & Colors - basic blocks

Anyone who’s been keeping up with A Fast Game knows that I’ve played a LOT of Commands & Colors in a number of flavours. When I started thinking about this as a post subject series was in two minds about including C&C, but it does fill the requirements of the earlier stated definition, and it seemed like a good – if chronologically unsound – place to start.

My first experience with Commands & Colors was an introductory game of Commands & Colors: Ancients (GMT Games, 2006), with two guys from my long-standing Wednesday group. I wasn’t aware of the game’s lineage, sharing the DNA of Battle Cry (Avalon Hill, 1999) and Memoir ’44 (Days of Wonder, 2004), but my initial reaction to seeing the battle (Cannae - 216BC) set up was “This is a minis game without the minis. That’s so cool!”

Commands & Colors is something of an aberration in the world of block games. Where most block games use the block mechanism to ensure certain information is hidden from the opponent, such as the current strength or even the type of unit, the units in Commands & Colors games proclaim much of their information for all to see. The blocks themselves have matching stickers, front and back, and the number of blocks conveys how many steps the unit has left (how much more of a battering it can take before losing cohesion). And if they didn’t declare themselves, you could at least make some educated guesses at to what you faced by the size and shape of the block.

The multiple blocks making up a unit act as hit points for the unit. When a unit takes a hit that it can’t otherwise soak, it loses a block. This is another point of separation from the traditional Columbia-style block game, which uses the individual unit to keep track of losses but tries to keep that information from the opponents. This, of course, doesn’t mean a for block unit loses a quarter of its functional strength as a fighting formation with each hit – Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) is the outlier here – but the loss represents a combination of reduction of troops, cohesion and morale, with the final loss representing the unit’s breakdown of cohesion and cessation of effectiveness as a fighting force.

C&C Tricorne: The American Revolution,

So, what’s the game trying to do? The whole idea of blocks for manoeuvre units, back with the very first block wargame, Quebec 1759 (Columbia Games, 1972) was to replicate the lack of adequate intelligence on both sides regarding opposing strengths during the French and Indian War. In Quebec, movement was also simultaneous. This was accomplished through the necessity of writing orders for your troops, while trying to second-guess your opponent’s plans. This creates a sense of what is referred to as “fog of war”, the creating a facsimile of the limited intelligence all tactical commanders have had to deal with since the dawn of battle.

Commands & Colors accomplishes something similar through the use of Command Cards. Rather than try to hide each player’s units or intentions from their opponent, the game system limits the ability to act on this intelligence by limiting what actions you can take in a given turn. You can see the enemy readying to strike on your thinly defended Left flank, but you can’t respond unless you happen to have a card in your hand that allows you to order your units in that section. While it’s not perfect, the mechanism offers a fair simulacrum of the confusion of battle, with orders being misunderstood, if received at all, and in the era of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics and Commands and Colors Tricorne: The AmericanRevolution (Compass Games, 2017), or for that matter, Battle Cry), the very real fog of spent gunpowder, obscuring friend and foe alike.

This is a vector for criticism of the C&C system, with folks complaining of never being able to do what they want to do at any given time. Well, welcome to life during wartime. This artificial limitation of options is much closer to the realities of warfare than many hex-and-counter wargames can reflect. It’s all well and good to prefer games that let you move all your pieces each turn without such hinderance, but don’t tell me it’s more realistic.

 

No minis

For me, a big strength of the C&C system that it allows a miniatures-style experience, but with movement regulation (via a hex-grid) and without actual miniatures. The truth is, if all the Commands & Colors system games had come out with minis representing the units, I probably would never have bought into the system so thoroughly. I know Memoir ’44, Battle Cry, and the fantasy-flavoured BattleLore (Days of Wonder, 2006) all have their fans, but it’s not for me. I don’t need plastic laying pieces to transport my imagination, and the lack of scale adhesion between units and such in Memoir ’44 is like fingernails on a blackboard for me; I really find it hard to look at (this is why I was never interested in Axis and Allies or Tide of Iron either)

GMT's C&C: Samurai Battles. No brittle figures to real with.

As I’ve said previously., I enjoy miniatures games. Our Wednesday game night host has an impressive collection of them, and we’ve played out situations from 4^th century Britain to 1980s Africa on his big table, but I personally don’t possess the talent or the patience (or the money, or the storage space, or frankly, the desire) to pursue the miniatures hobby myself. I came very close at one stage to buying Russian model and plastic figure company Zvezda’s Samurai Battles (Zvezda, 2012), which used Zvezda’s excellent 20mm (1:72 scale) feudal Japanese warriors instead of blocks, but ultimately decided against it. Imagine my delight when GMT re-released the game in a block version as Commands & Colors: Samurai Battles (GMT Games, 2021). It turns out the high-impact plastic Zvezda minis (the same quality plastic used for model planes or ships) are prone to breakages and very difficult to store, so I dodged a bullet there.

 

The Romance of Loss

Which brings me to another joy of block games generally. The pieces offer a tactile experience in moving – and in removal – that cardboard counters can’t replicate. This sense of weight and of loss is increased in a Commands & Colors game by the removal of blocks with each successful hit. It makes the audacious attack or dogged defence conducted by a reduced unit that much more valiant; it creates a mini-narrative withing the unfolding story of the whole battle.

C&C: Medieval. This battle was from the Crusades expansion.

I worked professionally with wood for some time – my father was a carpenter and my brother a cabinet maker, and I spent about two years as a machinist – so maybe I feel an affinity with wood. To me it feels like a natural fit for games. My earliest childhood games, draughts and dominoes, were made from wood. And in wargames especially, you can’t get away from it. Cardboard and paper are just radically transformed products made from wood. Coloured blocks with stickers applied aren’t comparable to ornate, hand-carved chess pieces, but to me they still bring a gravity and sense of connection beyond their basic function. This is probably, at least in part, what prompted me to pursue this series.

In the next part, I’ll go back to the beginning, starting with Columbia Games and the revolution the company began with Quebec 1759. There’s a long road ahead – I keep stumbling across other games where the designer has chosen three dimensional blocks instead of two-dimensional tiles to achieve some or other effect. And at least one case of the reverse, but that will be for another post.

 

 

Review: French and Indian War, 1757-1759

 

 

Worthington Publishing (and the company’s previous incarnation, Worthington Games) have a long and deep connection with the French and Indian War, as the North American theatre of the Seven-Years’ War (1754-1763) between the empires of Britain and France and their subjects and allies in the New World. Hold the Line (Worthington Games, 2008), and its revision, Hold the Line: the American Revolution (Worthington Publishing, 2016), each saw its own French and Indian War expansion (Worthington, 2008, 2016).

I was on the fence about French and Indian War, 1757-1759 (Worthington, 2020) game when it was first announced. Because of financial pressures at the time, I didn’t end up backing the Kickstarter; shipping to Australia always add around half to two-thirds the cost of the pledge. I like a block game, and I was thinking about grabbing a copy through Noble Knight, but I already owned Volko Ruhnke’s classic, Wilderness War (GMT Games, 2001). With limited storage space and a lot of historical areas my smallish-but-respectable collection doesn’t yet cover, could I justify buying a second French and Indian War game.

What convinced me was Bill Molyneaux’s review of the game on BoardGameGeek. Bill designed the well-received Wilderness Empires (Worthington Publishing, 2015), as well as a sack-load of other games set around aspects of the conflict, and is a historian and heavily involved in the F&IW re-enaction scene. He said it was, to his mind, the best game covering the conflict (and mentioned that his son prefers it to Bill’s own game). I confess, I haven’t played Wilderness Empires, but Molyneaux is a consistently solid historical game designer, so his endorsement counted for something with me. After reading his thoughts in it, I pulled the trigger on French and Indian War.

Having played it now half a dozen times and spent a lot more time thinking and writing about it, I feel like I’m in a good position to talk about this game. Having said that, I feel like it eludes me somewhat. It’s a simple game, very easy to pick up. I’d say it’s an excellent game for introducing new players to wargaming, and to block wargames in particular. But underneath its veneer of simplicity, there’s an awful lot going on in this game, and I’m certain I won’t be able to cover it all in this review.

Appearance

French and Indian War, 1757-1759 (F&IW) is a spare game, the mounted board is a narrow, four panel item (11” x 32”), representing the region in which the bulk of the action in the conflict took place from the northern shores of the Great Lakes to the frontiers of Pennsylvania, New York state, and New England, with key locations marked out, along with paths connecting one location to the next. The colour pallet is muted but nonetheless quite attractive; highlights the action rather than smothering it. The board also features a Year-track (1757-59), and turn-track (11 turns with a possible 12^th on a successful die roll for a late winter), and points tracks for each side (running 0-12).

F&IW is a block game, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably a fan or at least curious. The blocks in F&IW are of a typical size for a block game (comparable to the Columbia Games’ block games or the Cavalry blocks used in GMT’s Commands & Colors family of games) The British blocks are in a red very close to the British Redcoat uniform crimson; the French blocks are in a rather pale blue (which is historically more fitting than the expected royal blue). Two sets of stickers are provided with the game; these are applied to one side of the blocks, and represent the three types of units available to the players (French unit stickers on the blue blocks, British on the red). The differences in the sets are purely ascetic. I went with the more conventional of the two sets.

Also included are a handful of small black cubes intended for track markers. There are several more then are needed on the board, so we placed an extra one or two (as appropriate) on the 0-box to mark when the twelve-point track had been lapped (i.e. a 0 block and a 3 equals 15 points, two 0 blocks and a 2 would equal 26 points). We also used a spare block as a mnemonic for the location of a battle, as the pieces are all removed to a battle board for combat.

The Battle Board is where conflicts are resolved. This is a thick 11” by 8½” panel with a combat ranks and instructions printed on one side. On the reverse side is a break-down of the historical set-up for the game.

The game comes with six custom dice, used in the combat rounds. Units hit on their own symbols, of which there is only one face on each die; Regular army units hit on their respective flags, Irregulars hit on crossed tomahawks, and Militia on a roll of crossed muskets. The game also comes with a single regularly-pipped six-sider, for rolling at the end of the game-year to see if a late winter allows an extra turn that year.

French and Indian War comes with two copies of the rule book; this is something Worthington started doing a few years ago, and it is such a boon. The rules run to eleven of the twelve pages, and these include solitaire play guidelines and the option for hidden simultaneous movement (the game also comes with a pad especially for recording your movements before the simultaneous placement), which I can’t speak to because we haven’t tried that, but now I’m really wishing we had for at least one game; when we get around to playing this again I'll make sure to use the hidden movement rules and report back. The last page has a map with abbreviations for the hidden movement mode, but it doubles as a player’s aid (a good thing there’s two copies of the rules).

Play

The forces in French and Indian War are comprised of regiments Regular (professional) soldiers, cohorts of Militia, bands of Irregular units (Indians and Rangers), and naval units for gaining or challenging control over the Atlantic. These units are represented by labelled blocks, Red for the British and their allies, light blue for the French and their Indian tribes allied to Louis. The strength of each unit is indicated by a decreasing number of pips on the sides of the edges of the block sticker; as is typical with most block games, when a unit takes damage, the block is rotated counter-clockwise so that the upper edge always represents the current strength of the unit (i.e., a four-pip regular unit takes a hit; it is rotated so the upper edge now shows three pips). Combat rounds go rank by rank; first Irregulars, then Regular troops, then Militia. Defenders roll first, and hits are taken immediately, so there’s always the possibility of disadvantage as the attacker, especially when attacking a fort or a port settlement (attacking Irregulars and Militia roll with one les die on their first round).

The game is divided up into three years of 11 or 12 turns to a year, depending on the roll of a six-sided die to determine whether Winter sets in early or late (on a roll of 4-6, the players get one more turn for the year; on a 1-3 the snow comes early). Each location has a victory point score, which also corresponds to how many units can winter in that location. A winter garrison can exceed the VP number by one irregular unit and take no penalty, but any further units will take a one-pip drop in their strength (reflecting desertions, Militia members returning to their homesteads, etc.). Getting caught with a larger formation in a small town can be devastating.

The play action of French & Indian War is deceptively simple; with each turn, each side – beginning with the British – may move a unit of units from one location. These units can move from their point of origin to a single location, or they may disperse to separate adjoining locations, but most can only move to an adjacent location. The exception to this is the Irregulars – the allied Indian tribes and local Ranger units – who can move to a second connected location.

When you arrive at a location already inhabited by the enemy, you fight. The number of pips across the units in a rank dictate how many dice you roll for that rank, and you hit on that ranks’ symbol (crossed hatchets for the Irregulars, crossed muskets for the Militia, and the Union Jack and Fleurs de Lys for the British and French Regulars respectively). In this game the dice are unforgiving. Whatever you are fighting with has a one-in-six chance of raining hurt down upon the opposing side. Sometimes a whole round or two of combat will prove ineffectual for both sides. But occasionally a single roll can be devastating. Only occasionally, though (statistics say so). Being a block game, you don’t know what your opponent has placed where until you test it, and in this, combat can have as much use as a method of probing for intelligence as its more obvious purpose. Knowing where the other side is strongest can deliver vital information regarding your opponent’s intentions.

For all the reduced movement options and sometimes sluggish combat resolution, French and Indian War is a remarkably fast-playing game. Our first run at it had all the usual qualities of a learning game, and so ran to about two hours and twenty minutes, but from the third game on, we managed to keep play within the 90 minutes suggested on the box. French and Indian War is a tight game that flows easily, so long as you’re not given to labouring over every difficult choice.

Appraisal

F&IW involves a combination of strategy, guesswork and, to a degree, dumb luck, though not as much as it might appear on the face of it. To win, one side must gain a clear ten-point majority in points at the end of a year, after any territorial gains have been tabulated. Each unit destroyed offers the victor a single point, but you’re not going to win by killing the enemy. Taking territory is where the points are, but it’s not enough to push the enemy out of his homes; to claim a location as a prize, one of your units must reside there at the close of the year. That means, to have a chance at winning that ten-point lead, you will have to spread your forces fairly thinly in an effort to gain those extra victory points. And if you don’t win the game that year, you’ll be spending turns gathering up your units for another fight or two before trying to claim all that territory again. This also means that a fight to the death isn’t in your interests. If you knock out two of the other guy’s units but lose one or two yourself, you may not be able to cover the terrain you need for those elusive points. French and Indian War is a long string of difficult choices.

While it is a relatively simple game to learn, and only really has one scenario (two if you count the historical set-up and free placement as separate scenarios), French and Indian War is a rare gem of a game; I found it reveals its depths slowly, rewarding multiple games with new insights. It elegantly captures the difficulties of waging a frontier war with restricted movement options, limited resources and manpower, and a mutual enemy in the harsh North American winters I’d put it on the same level as the best of Columbia Games' block games. I think the key to approaching the game is to adopt a guerrilla mindset, more Mao Zedong than Antoine-Henri Jomini. It was impossible to run a set-piece decisive battle in the vast wilderness the Great Lakes region in the mid-eighteenth century. Most actions in the game are small concerns, with one side conceding the ground and backing off to maintain their force strength of another day. Sometimes it can feel like whack-a-mole; each side is limited in its resources and stifled in its manoeuvre options, and I can see how some might find the frustration insurmountable, but its these elements that make the game such a strategic showpiece. It’s difficult to spring a surprise on your opponent when it takes your forces three turns to get into a position to pounce. This game rewards a flexible approach to fighting, and makes unanticipated demands on its players.

I’m sure some folks will balk at the ponderous nature of F&IW; the limited movement, the potential for successive rounds of ineffectual combat, and the requirements of winter-quartering potentially chewing up your last three or four moves for the year. But all these aspects work together to abstractly recreate the difficulties of fighting a war in the truly untamed and inhospitable environment of the Great Lakes region. Dealing with these restrictions through the course of play elevates this game of simple mechanisms into a deep historical simulation. French and Indian War is a deft and elegant example of game design.

 

 

The fresh contenders; or Churchill’s replacement

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been wanting to swap out Churchill from my original 6x6 list of games for 2023. I was excited at the prospect of a game-related challenge, and have been keen to get Churchill to the table since my P500 copy of the latest print run arrived. I knew it was a three player, but that it can be played as a two player with a Stalin-bot, but from earlier experience with under-player-ing Versailles 1919 (GMT, 2020), I really think I owe it to the game to have a three-player experience.

So, having decided to put aside Churchill for now, I needed to come up with a suitable replacement for that slot in my 6x6 endeavour. Going through my shelves, I picked out a stack of possible candidates. After some consideration of my shelves, I managed to whittle the list down to four likely contenders which, I am embarrassed to say, I still haven’t got around to playing for one reason or another. These are:

• Richard III: the Wars of the Roses (Columbia Games, 2009)
• Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019)
• Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62 (GMT, 2017)
• Verdun1916: Steel Inferno (Fellowship of Simulations, 2020)

The oldest of these, in terms of ownership, is Colonial Twilight. I bought it during GMT’s 2021 Summer Sale (along with a truckload of other games), and was very excited about it when it arrived. I read the rules, flattened out the mounted board under some other weighty game-boxes, set the game up and played through handful of turns, two-handed. By the end of that I felt like I was getting the game. I was impressed by the new mechanics for this first two-player COIN game and the simple actions - complex ramifications nature of the play. It was an elegant game and I couldn’t wait to play it with an opponent.

And then I didn’t. Looking back, I don’t know what pushed it off my radar; it may have been another game I was even more eager to try out, or it might have been some aspect of my Life Outside Games that fought for my attention. I would have put away Colonial Twilight with the best of intentions of pulling it out again soon and getting back to it, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The problem with Colonial Twilight is the fact that is breaks one of the informal guidelines I set myself for the 6x6 challenge; it would be a second game designed by Brian Train, who is responsible for Brief Border Wars and the upcoming Brief Border Wars 2 (Compass Games, slated for release this year). Brian’s games are always interesting and challenging, but it would feel wrong to privilege one designer over all the others whose work I really like and respect. If I do this again next year, though, I think I have my first pick.

Richard III is a classic Columbia Games block game. They make a lot, and by all reports, nearly all are at least very good, and some are exceptional (Crusader Rex (2005) gets mentioned a lot around the forums). This would be an easy choice is I didn’t already have three block games (This War Without an Enemy, The French and Indian War, and Napoleon 1806) on my list already. I’ll still try to introduce T to the joys of Columbia’s block game style sometime soon, but It’s not going on the list.

Verdun 1916, while technically a block game (it uses rectangular wooden pieces to represent formations and thinner, matchstick-sized ones for trenches), the style of play is so radically different from anything else I possess that I would be happy to pick it. There are two things that are stopping me from going with Verdun for my 6x6 challenge; firstly, I’ve tried to select games from different conflicts. World War I is already represented by Hexasim’s Great War Commander.

Which brings me to my second reason for its exclusion. Three of the five remaining games on the list are from French publishers – Nuts!, Shakos, and Hexasim. This shouldn’t be at all surprising; companies all across Europe are producing excellent, thoughtful, and challenging games. In good conscience, wanting Great War Commander on the list precluded me adding The Fate of the Reiters (Hexasim, 2019). Nonetheless, I hope to get in a few games of Verdun sometime this year, and report back accordingly.

It would seem that the last man standing will be Undaunted: Normandy. This is a fairly recent acquisition, having arrived a little before Christmas. I’ve owned Undaunted: North Africa (Osprey, 2020) for maybe a year, and have managed to get it to the table – at least for two-handed solo play – several times.

When U:N first arrived on the scene, I was sceptical. I owned a handful of Osprey games and loved all of them.  But it seemed to me, on the face of it to be too much of a crossover game, a self-conscious attempt to make a wargame that would appeal to non-wargamers to “trick” them into wargaming. When U:NA came out, I was a little more familiar with the work of co-designer David Thompson, and, having only recently read Gavin Mortimer’s The Men Who Made the SAS (Little, Brown; 2016), I was intrigued by the historical background of the game, and – frankly- it was pretty good value for money.

Reader, I bought it. And it’s a purchase I haven’t had cause to regret. I was really surprised to see how well the deckbuilding mechanics worked in the context of the game. It’s definitely at the “game” end of the game-simulation continuum, but it’s a lot of fun, and, as rules familiarity increases, quite a fast-moving game, but it still offers challenges and decision-points enough to feel like a satisfying and worthwhile experience.

As I understand it, the scale of Undaunted: Normandy differs from U:NA – the units are squads and support weapon teams rather than individual combatants, and vehicles were only introduced to the game in the second offering (although, I believe, vehicle options for U:N scenarios feature in the Undaunted: Reinforcements (Osprey, 2021) deep box).

I think Undaunted: Normandy will also be the right level of complexity for my primary opponent, T. T is by no means stupid – he’s a senior medical specialist – but he has a serious job that comes with equally serious responsibilities, and as such, has a limited capacity for processing new information, like game rules. After a couple of plays he’s usually picked up the basics, and after half-a-dozen or so games he’s usually giving me a run for my money (we're pretty evenly matched at all of the games we're most familiar with), but as we catch up at best once a week, a lot of table time will be spent in revision for the first few runs at a new rules-set.

But for now, we will be concentrating on Napoleon 1806.  This week we’ll be graduating to the Rules for the Conscript. I think I’ve assimilated the extra rules and am ready to make six or seven mistakes in the first half-hour of play, but that’s how we learn, right?