![]() The French has better artillery, and also has more leaders, who improve the effectiveness of their army. The game starts with the French outnumbering the Allies, and the Allied infantry all in defensive positions. So it will take some time to get used to and to remember. All these modifiers are realistic, no doubt about it, but there is a lot to remember. ![]() There are so many reference tables to look up, and so many modifiers for die roll results. The game is also a bit complex, especially in the different behaviours of the different troop types and the procedures for combat resolution. You do feel like you are in the shoes of the commanders of that famous battle. However square formation is bad when you are being shot at, because you are standing very close to your fellow countrymen like bowling pins. Defensive formation prevents movement but allows your infantry to switch to square formation if attacked by cavalry, which is important. Formations are mostly applicable to infantry. There is a very specific combat resolution procedure you need to follow to resolve an assault. This is when infantry and cavalry rush in to an enemy occupied space to fight, and this is where most people get killed. The actions allowed in the game are what you would expect - different types of movement, artillery fire, formation changes, assaults etc. So you can deliberately use up your green discs quickly, to force an earlier end of turn. A turn ends if initiative passes to a player who no longer has green action discs. You probably want to do this only if you are the Allied player though (who wins by surviving until game end). So do you gamble that you will have enough actions to execute a master stroke, or should you be conservative and plan for a surer but less spectacular move?Īnother interesting thing that you can do is deliberate time wasting. Consecutive actions are important for setting up positions and then executing a big assault, but you can't be sure how many consecutive actions you'll get. He will tell you only when you have used up your discs allowed for that stretch. The tricky thing is you don't know how many discs you get to spend at any one stretch, but your opponent does. You don't take turns to use these discs, instead you get to use 2 to 5 discs, before passing the initiative to your opponent. Every turn, each player has some discs in 3 colours, that are used to execute different types of actions. The game flow is quite unique and interesting. They all behave very differently, and there are many different rules that make them very unique. You have 4 types of units in the game - infantry, cavalry, artillery and leaders. The Allies win by conquering a town on the French side of the board, or by killing 16 French units (excluding cavalry), or by simply surviving until the end of the 9 turns. The French wins by conquering a town on the Allied side of the board, or by killing 13 Allied units (excluding cavalry and Prussians). The game plays over 9 turns, each representing an hour, from 12noon to 8pm. One player plays the French, and the other plays the Allied forces (English, Dutch, Germans, and a separate army of Prussians). It is, of course, about the famous battle where Napoleon suffered a defeat. Waterloo is a new game from Martin Wallace, designer of Automobile which I had just played the previous weekend, but this is a completely different animal. We played Waterloo and Warriors of God, both wargames involving the French and the English, from different eras. Coincidentally he had two new 2-player-only wargames, so the timing was perfect. The few potential players all couldn't make it, so it was just the two of us. Not that it was what we had intentionally planned. On Han came over for a 2-player wargame session.
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