Skip to main content

Napoleon's Triumph and repeat play

I bought Napoleon's Triumph several years ago when it was cheap and life was easy. I found it pretty hardcore and only pulled it off the shelf once every six months so I sold it to some dude from Sheffield. Since then I've moved to Sheffield and that dude (James) is one of my main game opponents. Recently (relatively) we've been playing Napoleon's Triumph.

Image by Mitte_70, borrowed from BGG.
I think my initial feelings about this game have been validated. If you play it regularly there is some thing really unique here. With single sporadic games you have to relearn the un-intuitive rules and live through the same mistakes. It becomes a game of who makes biggest blunder first.

In our most recent game James took me by surprise by effectively using his cavalry to screen. I know that this is the primary role of cavalry in most warfare but this was the first game I have seen it done effectively. It tied down my best infantry corps more or less taking it out of the game. In the centre we pushed our corps around. I avoided Jame's trap and even took the upper hand for me to then lose it all in one large and badly thought through push. Things then went to pot pretty fast with the allied centre collapsing a few turns later.

We've played Rachel's other more recent game Guns of Gettysburg a couple of times too. Until this game of Napoleon's Triumph I felt that Guns was actually the better title, now I'm not so sure. Napoleon's Triumph is actually a little short for what it is. Normally brevity is a good thing in a game but with NT I feel that the room for mistakes is so great an extra hour of run time and a little more forgiveness may benefit it. Guns on the other hand is a little long.

My main point in writing in this post is only get one of Rachel's games if you have a regular opponent and you both want to really invest in learning the game. As dedicated games these are great, as one off experiences they are a frustration.

Found this in Vienna, nice holiday surprise after the boredom of Baroque

Comments

  1. I like the look of it from the photos - has the feel of the original Kriegsspiel about it.

    I think that there is a bit of a conundrum in gaming that the best games you enjoy the most require a level of time investment that you can't put it often leading you to try simpler and often less rewarding games that can cause you to loose your enthusiasm.

    I do think though my lack of napoleonic knowledge would hinder me in this. That said its modelling of cavalry is refreshing.

    Cheers,

    Pete.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Its a very pretty game, the designers others are too, but it feels rather like an abstract until you really get into it. The cannon rules still make zero sense to me from a thematic point of view. Its an area map and you declare attack feints to draw off enemy blocks before hitting at a point they cannot defend. Its very original but can be rather confusing at first.

      Delete
    2. I'd agree that this needs regular attention. I prefer Gettysburg but I know it a lot better than NT at this stage, as well as just preferring ACW to Nap.

      I think Simmons best game is yet to come.

      - J

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quick Looks: Cimean War Battles - Tchernaya River

 A quick one today I traded off Across the Narva by Revolution Games (should post something on this) for an oldish (2000) copy of an S&T magazine. The mag came with two battles reprinted from the 1978 Quad game on the Crimean War. The full Quad also contained Inkerman and Balaklava, this magazine version just has Tchernaya River and Alma. Initial setup Early SPI games (and actually GDW and AH come to think of it) of the 70s tend to have lots of rules you already know. I go, U go, movement, fire, melee, rally, and most of the rules are standard. Command and control rules and friction of war arrived a lot later. To couter this I have added a simple house rule. For each division (units are brigates and regiments, about 2-8 per division) roll. On a 1 in 6 movement is halved unless the unit can charge, in which case it must charge the nearest enemy.  A simple easy to apply rule for generating those light brigade charges. You could also easily convert this to a chit pull game by division

Quick Looks; Red Star / White Eagle

I generally hate it when people describe designs or ideas in games as dated, because many of the most innovative games  are older than I am. Equally it implies there is something innately good about new designs, which I don't think there is. Dune is arguably the best multiplayer 'war' boardgame and the 70s basic DnD is in my view still the best RPG. I wasn't born until the late 80s and didn't discover these things to the mid 2000s so this isn't nostalgia doing my thinking, its just that some old ideas are better than new ones, despite our apparent 'progress'. Back when Roger B MacGowan did cool art house covers But having said all this Red Star / White Eagle is a dated game design. And this matters if you are looking at popping £70 on a new reprint of it from Compass Games. I am a wary cheapskate so I picked up a second hand copy with a trashed box of ebay for £20. It was worth it, but only just. Poles have just been creamed on the south we

Wilderness War is probably the best CDG (review)

One attribute of a good war game is that it opens up rather than narrows down the more you play it. Each time you play you see there is more strategic depth than you thought there was. When I first started playing Wilderness War, a card driven wargame design (CDG) on the French Indian War by Volko Runke, I thought it was simply a case of the British building a large kill stack and marching it up the Hudson and the French trying to get enough victory points (vps) from raiding to win before the inevitable. The outcome would likely be decided by card play and who got the reinforcement cards when they needed them. The game is afoot.  Four games later I have realised that this is not the case. Yes the British will sometimes win by marching a big army up the Hudson and sieging out Montreal, but a lot of the time things will play out quite differently. Maybe the French strike first, perhaps the British realise that going up the Hudson is going to be a slog try another route. Ei