State of Play: Napoléon 1806 (5/6)

 

 

Gentle reader, an apology. After a drought of wargaming over the last several weeks, due to a perfect storm of preventative factors, I hope to now return to some regular reporting and reviewing. After a three-week hiatus (four if you count the week we played Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022 – game report here), involving two overseas trips and Hallowe’en celebrations for my adversary, and a mixture of technological failings and familial duties on my part, on Monday night T and I finally got together for game five of Napoléon 1806 (Shakos, 2019). This time out, we incorporated the last two components from the Rules for the Grognard that we hadn’t already adopted: the inclusion of cavalry units and free set-up. I’ll get back to these in a minute.

This was the penultimate game of my 6x6 excursion into the Prussian campaign, and if nothing else, the previous four games have highlighted for me just how little I know about Napoleon’s early campaigns into central Europe. The names of the battles sound familiar; Halle, Schleiz, Jena-Auerstedt. But I’m just not as familiar with this part of the Napoleonic era as I am with the Peninsula War. If anyone can recommend a good general history covering the rise of Napoleon through to about 1812, please leave me a note in the comments.

A neutral view of the antagonists facing-off.

Napoléon 1806 covers the period from the 8^th to the 21^st of October of that year, during Bonaparte's campaign against the Fourth Coalition. The game is only seven turns in full, so the action can move quite quickly, subject to the size of your formations and your luck with the card draws. As I’ve mentioned previously, the blocks represent the forces under the senior generals involved on each side during the campaign. The relative strength of each command is managed off-board, on a tally chart recording the disposition and exhaustion level of each unit on a side, information that is shielded from the other player. When moving a formation, the player declares the unit to be moved and draws a card, and the points-value of the drawn card dictates how far the unit can move. Blocks may move together in larger formations, but for each  

As mentioned, we used the free-setup rule for this game; the movement is point-to-point, with each point representing a town or city of the region, and the connections the road and path network connecting these places Some are superimposed with either a French or Prussian eagle; these mark the places at which formations may be placed. T played the French, as is his wont, and set up in an aggressive fashion; as the Prussians, I set up more defensively. It’s not really an option in the game for the Prussians to go on the offensive too strongly, too early. The odds are weighted on the side of the French, both in numbers (the French side fields one more formation than the Prussians) and in strength (most of the Prussian formations are under-strength, and while there are possible opportunities for reinforcements – two cards that can be played in the draw phase, if they happen to be drawn), these only add one infantry cube to a given formation, which in many cases won’t be enough to grant the unit an extra card in combat). 

I did place a double formation threateningly close to Bamberg in an attempt to tie-up some of T’s forces and limit his options. There are four cities on the board worth victory points – Erfurt, Halle and Leipzig (which begin the game under Prussian control), and Bamberg, which is the source of French supply, their anchor for the campaign. In the game these are referred to as citadels. Victory in Napoléon 1806 is points-based; one point for each enemy formation eliminated, with the four citadels worth varying numbers of points. Capturing all three northern citadels would all but hand victory over to the French, but the loss of Bamberg could draw a victory put of reach for the French player.  Not only did T keep two units close to Bamberg, but in a moment of analysis paralysis, he held another two or three units (I suspect one was a Cavalry token) in reserve at Münchberg, too distant to relieve the Bamberg protectors or to provide effective support for the Leipzig-Halle push.

Turn 3: Tauentzien's defiant stand.

As has happened in previous games, this one was dogged by rain (turns three and five). Rain is dictated by the draw of a card during the draw phase and only the; each turn begins with both players drawing three cards from their deck and placing them in their hand. If one or both draws a Rain card, that is placed in the Rain box for the turn. Rain adds an extra exhaustion point to every unit activated, whether they actually get to move or not, and adds an extra point cost to movement for the whole formation. If the rain card is drawn at any other time, it’s used only for it’s points or combat value, dependent on the draw.

It’s tempting to sit out the rain turns, especially with larger formations, but movement is crucial to the game for both sides, especially for the French, who have to bring their forces up nearly the full length of the map to traverse to challenge Leipzig and Halle if they are going to have a chance of winning.

Turn 4: a marked lack of progress on either side.

The free setup also worked against both of us to a degree. It’s been a month since we last played Napoléon 1806, and that distance worked against us. I think T had an overall ambition of racing to the Leipzig/Halle corner of the map and swiftly seizing them before I could reinforce the cities, then turning on Erfurt, but I don’t think he considered the logistics of that action too thoroughly before setting up. The French advance is often hindered by the lack of channels for forward movement. Moving a formation into a position already occupied by a friendly formation will halt your movement (though you only ‘pay’ for the distance achieved). Drawing a low-point card for the first formation in line will stymie anyone following, unless you can find them an alternate route, which I suppose is one of the joys of point-to-point movement games. From Münchberg there is only a single path north until you reach Hef, where the path branches into two paths. This is the most direct passage to Halle/Leipzig, and the only way to avoid the river crossings that may be dynamited by the uppity Prussians. Any stalling there due to a bad activation draw along there is going to slow you down for a turn, maybe two. That kind of delay will almost certainly cost the French player the game.

All the action at end of Turn 6. Blücher (activated, face-down) makes a
desperate run to slow the French progress toward Halle. The draw off a six-point
card - unlikely but possible - could put a French formation into the city in the next turn..

To be fair, I only sprung the free setup inclusion on him when he arrived. If T had been given more time to examine the situation, I think he would have placed things differently I should have put more thought into my placement as well. I was concerned about T pushing up through the forest in the south-west of the map, north of Bamberg (by orientation – upper right in most of the photos) and quickly closing the distance on Erfurt. I tended to pair-up my formations in an effort to make them more of a challenge, while pairing some weaker generals with Cavalry blocks to make them appear stronger. This backfired when T sent Murat and Brassiere against Tauentzien, who was backed only by a Cavalry token. The cavalry blocks don’t provide any assistance in combat; they are really there for bluff value only, to add a further measure of fog-of-war to a battlefield already soaked in it.

Tauentzien, to his credit, didn’t go down without a fight. The formation made its stand at Schleitz (as it appears on the game board), and held the town for the first round of combat in turn three (trading damage point for point, so no retreat required), and fell in the next turn. But his sacrifice meant that that two of T’s better units were tied up for two turns, and with only three turns left, he couldn’t draw a high-enough point card to bring the combined formation up to threaten Halle and Leipzig. Other forces came closer to threatening Erfurt, but I think that was a feint on T’s part; I suspect that of the two blocks one or both were cavalry tokens. T will normally not shy away from a fight, but he refused to engage combat on a couple of occasions with that formation. No so clever as he thinks.

State at end of Turn 7, from the Prussian side.
(Note the one  surviving Prussian Cavalry marker, to the left.)

This game saw a lot of jockeying for advantage, and a lot of false starts due to low card draws and inclement weather, but little actual confrontation. Tauentzien was the only casualty of the whole game, gaining T the only point shift, but his sacrifice probably saved the Prussian cause. There were other altercations (two near Bamberg), but nothing conclusive. Prussia won by default, maintaining control of Erfurt, Leipzig and Halle, but it didn't feel at all triumphant.

State at end of Turn 7, from the French side.

Next week, all things being equal, will be the last game in the Napoleon 1806 6x6 cycle. A considered review should follow soon after. Oh, and I now have both follow-up games; I ordered Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020) from the good folks at Hexasim within days of receiving 1806, and couple of weeks ago, I managed to nab a copy of Napoléon 1815 (Shakos, 2022, and a nominee for the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Napoleonic Wargame for 2022). I hope to get those to the table early in the new year, with reviews following.

End-game disposition of the French...

... And the Prussian formations. The two stray exhaustion markers are from
pretending to place them while moving Cavalry token, All part of the deception.

 

State of Play: Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna, 1683 (2/6)

 

This week T asked if I minded meeting at his place for a game. We’ve both really been enjoying burrowing into Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2917), but it takes a bit of time to set up, with the two army boards, the pre-set block placement, and such. So, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to introduce my partner in crime (crimes against rules as written sometimes) to the enigma that is Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022). It’s my most recent sub-in for my 6x6 list (if you missed it, you can catch the third quarter progress report here). I’ve played it about four times now, but only once with another person. The other times were learning games, and I don’t feel like I’ve learnt much so far.

In case you missed it, Fire and Stone came out last year, the first wargame release by Capstone Games, a company best known for family games like Terra Mystica, (Capstone Games, 2012), Orleans (Capstone, 2014), and Ark Nova (Capstone, 2021). There is some debate over whether Fire and Stone should be classified as a wargame; I try not to get in the middle of these sorts of arguments, neither being an Owl or a Rooster, a Jet or a Shark, or whatever. Granted, it’s unconventional; the game plays out on a hex-grid (tick for the wargame camp), but said hex-grid is ten hexes long and only three columns wide. It has wooden pieces for the fortifications and cannon, but the opposing armies are asymmetric decks of cards. In this question, I’m going to defer to those presumably more knowledgeable on these matters than me – the Charles S. Roberts Awards board, which accepted a nomination for the game to be considered for the Best Gunpowder Wargame category this year. It didn’t win, but it was in very good company*.

Teaching a game is good (with a forgiving audience) because it highlights any misunderstandings you have or patches in the game that you’re not quite across. There was a few of those in this game. But honestly, I was surprised I remembered as much as I did of how the game plays. I don’t have enough experience with the game to be able to say this with any authority, but I suspect the Ottoman player has the ore straight-forward role in the game, that of pushing ever forward and eventually controlling the Curtain Wall hex at the Habsburg’s baseline, so I gave that faction to T to play. After going through the turn structure and the options available – each layer deals themselves off five Strategy cards, then take turns either playing a card for its event or discarding a card to do an action – we got into it and learned by doing.

Fire and Stone looks like a difficult game out of the box. The way it’s put together challenges your expectations of what a wargame should be. But at its heart, it’s a game of simple parameters but deep strategy. It’s actually rather easy to teach. Each of the five rounds consist of five cards each, played consecutively, starting with the Ottomans. You play a card for event or as an action, then your opponent does the same. You have five tactics cards that give you a bit of a leg-up, but you can’t just blow through them because you only have five of them for twenty-five (or possibly more) event/action plays, and some of them might be reaction cards, only playable on the other player’s action.

The game ran fairly smoothly for a first go with a new player. T picked it up surprisingly quickly (more quickly than I did on my first couple of two-handed solo forays). Like Worthington’s Great Sieges games, if the last card is played and the Ottomans haven’t gained control of the Curtain Wall hex, it’s a default win for the Habsburgs. This wasn’t an issue for T; he laid his control marker on the Curtain Wall on the fifth card of round four. I have to put it down to some luck, but mostly having the nerve to commit his troops heavily to the battle actions that won him successive hexes in the second and third rounds (this can be risky – commit your best troops early and you run the risk of them being lost to enemy cannon fire for the rest of the game).

Defeat in the fourth round

This AAR feels a little shallow to me; Fire and Stone is a nuanced game, and I’m still feeling out how everything operates withing the game. But T’s game was like a bettering ram. That may have come down to the card selection on the night. Nearly all of T’s card events were aggressive ones. Mine tended to win back some troops of raise morale a notch (I’ll talk more about morale in the next report). I’m not angry or annoyed T won his first game. I’m just surprised at the sense of inevitability it carried.

We’ll probably come back to Napoleon 1806 over the next couple of weeks, to draw a line under that, and get started on the review (spoiler alert: it will be positive). But game three of Fire and Stone won’t be too far away.

* Charles S Roberts Award for Best Gunpowder Wargame: 

1565: Siege of Malta, Worthington Publishing, designer Maurice Suckling

Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683, Capstone Games, designer Robert DeLeskie

Nagashino 1575 & Shizugatake 1583, Serious Historical Games, designer Phillipe Hardy

WINNER: No Peace Without Honor, Compass Games, designer David Meyler

Wars of Religion, France 1562-1598, Fellowship of Simulations, designer Jerome Lefrancq

State of Play: a few quiet weeks ahead, and the CSR winners announced!

 

 

Not much to report on the practical gaming front at the moment. No Monday games for a couple of weeks and the Wednesday group has returned to RPGs for the foreseeable. I’ll be trying to get couple of solo games in until regular programming resumes.

In other news, the Charles S. Roberts Awards winners have just been announced about twelve hours ago (at time of writing). Congratulations to the winners and to the nominees; 2022 was a really good year for wargames, and just gaining a nomination for a category is a tough gig, given the quality of games generally out there these days. You can find the full listing of the winners and nominees in their respective categories here.

Discounting the magazines and expansions for existing games, there are 58 titles represented among the fifteen game-oriented categories. Going over the lists. I realised that I own nine of these titles (and one of the expansions, but that’s a different story for another time). I’ve written reviews of two of the games (414BC: Siege of Syracuse and 1565: Siege of Malta), and shared some impressions on another three (Caesar!, Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683, and Plains Indian Wars). I’m also actively seeking out another six games, with fourteen more again on my wish-list.

Since I can’t seem to make much progress on my 6x6 list for a while, I’m going to turn my attention to some of the Charles S. Roberts Awards winners and nominees. I don’t think I’ll get through all the games I own from the list, but there are a couple I’ve been meaning to write up already, and haven’t had the time. Suddenly, I don’t have that excuse to hide behind. I’ll start with those I already own, and add to the list as I secure others. I can’t guarantee a close schedule for these reviews; I will knock them out as quickly as I can replay them and gather my thoughts, then get them down on proverbial paper. I promise I will try to present something thoughtful, readable, and at least mildly diverting. With pictures.

 

  

Stripped down for parts: Fire and Stone: the Siege of Vienna

 

Robert De Leskie’s Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022) is one of those games what will have the opinionated arguing for years to come: Is it a wargame? Is it a Euro? Is it trying to awkwardly straddle the two camps, pretending to be a wargame when it clearly isn’t because it has little cannon meeples and wooden fieldworks markers and… oh, wait…

For my money, Fire and Stone is clearly a wargame, even though it looks a lot like something that could take a prize at a German game industry convention. The theme is an episode in a much longer conflict between the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire. In 1683 an 90,000-strong Muslim army marched on and laid siege to the fortified city of Vienna, outnumbering the defenders nearly eight-to-one. Historically, the city held out for fifty-nine days, until it was relieved by a cavalry army lead by Polish king Jan III Sobieski, and the siege was lifted.

Fire and Stone is an abstracted treatment of that siege. One player takes the role of the besieging Ottoman Turks, the other the brave Habsburg defenders facing overwhelming odds.

 

The box is a nice, solid with firm-fitting lid, but is still not too difficult to open. The box cover art is elegant in its simplicity, with the title appearing in a suitably archaic font, and embossed with the split sword insignia of the Ottoman Empire and the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs.

The back of the box continues in the same thematic style, and advises that the game is for two players*, and that it recommended for players aged 14 and up, and should play in 60-90 minutes. These feel right, given the different play concepts introduced in the game (more about these in a review to come). It also reassures the player that knowledge of siege warfare is not require to play the game.

In fact, the whole package is so beautifully presented – the inside of the box-lid is illustrated with an image of the brutal nature of the fighting at the siege, while the travel insert (the shaped piece of card that stops the map-board and the components from moving around too much during shipping) shares some of the same graphic qualities as the box front, emblazoned with the tile panel and the crossed match-lock muskets, and a vivid splash of colour with the red Ottoman and Yellow Habsburg crests.

The rulebook is printed on glossy, fine-quality paper, and is very well laid out, with a decent-sized font and two-column format. Illustrations and descriptive examples make the whole package clear and easy to understand; despite some different concepts appearing in the game, you won’t need a degree in ludology to interpret these rules.

Along with the rulebook, a booklet of historical and designer notes is also included. I always appreciate the extra effort that goes into design notes and a good bibliography (part of the joy of a new wargame is learning about the period and events it highlights), and putting it all into a separate booklet is really a cut above the standard.

The board is about 23” by 16.5”, in muted tones of browny-greys and greens, representing the Ottoman camp, the staging area before the outer walls (glacis), the two sets of bastions and the Curtain Wall, which the Ottomans must breech to fulfill one of the paths to victory. It is divided into huge hexes that take up most of the play area, but are only four columns deep and three rows wide (4” hexes. This isn’t a game of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, but one of slow advancement and dogged defence; a war of attrition.

Two player’s aid cards are included in the package (no expense spared). These are identical, except for the Ottoman split sword on a red background or Habsburg double-headed eagle on a vivid red background. The PACs are as clear and well laid-out as the rulebook, with turn structure, battle process and exceptions all spelt out concisely.

But for me the best part of the whole package is the components. There are wooden pieces representing cannons and fieldworks, thick cardboard area control markers and shovel tokens to draw for mine actions (and a pair of lush draw bags to put them in).

Everything as it comes in the box. You can't see them very well in this photo,
but the turn, morale and battle markers are all screen-printed wooden pieces.

Mine draw tokens and Control markers.

The cards are printed on good stock. Each side has three decks; one each of strategy cards and tactics cards, and a slimmer reck representing their side’s fighting forces. Each of the strategy cards has a note as the bottom tying that card’s action to a particular event or mundane occurrence during the siege, and there are more of both the strategy and the tactics cards than you will use in a single game, adding baked in replayability to the package.

Sample Strategy cards.

Sample Tactics cards.

The Army cards represent a spread of forces displaying a strength of 1, 2 or 3, but each is denoted with a particular troop type that participated in the siege. These are beautifully illustrated in a style reminiscent of the era.

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Sample army cards.

A lot of care has gone into the design and production of Fire and Stone. It is a gorgeous game to look at with a nice, tactile experience of play. The brightly coloured pieces really pop on the muted-palette board, and the card illustrations add to the verisimilitude of the experience. The reality of the situation is perhaps restricted to the little historical notes on the base of the cards, and the historical notes that come with the game, which are well worth the time to read them.

 

* Given the nature of play (lots of concealed information), Fire and Stone is low on the solitaire-playability scale. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it – I got familiar with the game the same way a lot of people do, playing two-handed – but for the best experience, this is a game you want to play with a friend.

State of Play: no 6x6 progress, but a siege at Vienna

 

 

With T overseas, I corralled B for an off-the-books Monday night game. I had proposed Great War Commander, but given the late hour we were starting, I thought better of it and brought Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022).

Nice art.

Fire & Stone was a fairly recent acquisition and a bit of an impulse buy. I’d read some good things about it and the small scale of the play area (three by four hexes) intrigued me. I basically bought it to bring an order up to free shipping. (Why is it we’ll happily spend an extra $60 or $70 to save $10 on postage? Tune in to my new psychology blog Why We Do Dumb Things Pretty Much All the Time.*)

Anyway, I was running late, and with the set-up of a still unfamiliar game, we agreed to play it through as a learning game. We ran through four of the five rounds (each round is up to five actions per side). B would have a different take, but I could see my Habsburgs loosing through army elimination withing another couple of actions to the withering onslaught of B’s Ottoman infidels, or from a complete collapse of morale, so we called it. Next time we’ll both be more familiar with how the gears of the game mesh, and I think I’ll be trying a fighting withdrawal strategy.

I'll be posting a Stripped Down for Parts of Fire & Stone later today or tomorrow, so there's something to look forward to. Until then, marvel at the little tiny cannons!

 

* Or read Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, and/or You are Not So Smart, by David McRaney