What? Even more Napoleonic rules?
Well, it was probably inevitable.
Just as Napoleon is said to have mused that every
French soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his
knapsack, I had a pretty firm feeling that every
Napoleonic wargamer carried his own set of
wargames rules mulling around in his head, if not
already homebrewed or published. Mine had
certainly been brewing for some time.
Now, I wasn’t unaware that just mentioning that
you had the audacity to have a set of Napoleonic
rules merely stewing gently in your noodle that
you were dicing with a proverbial hot potato. In
my defence, I never thought that I would ever write
– dare to write – or even need to write my own.
There were a lot of good wargames rule-sets
available to the Napoleonic gamer. And I had
bought a couple more since first mentioning rules
on my 1809 Blog (see Post 4). The value of sticking
to a published set being that you were much more
likely to find an opponent to game with.
More Napoleonic Rules
However, when I resolved definitely – really
definitely – on base and unit sizes (please, no
more rebasing!) I pretty well had to find a set of
rules that worked with how I wanted my games
to look and play. Or write my own. Or at the
very least, adapt a commercial rule-set to suit
my chosen idiosyncrasies.
I spent a good deal of time trying to modify my
favourite rule-sets but with no real success.
However, out of the blue – or the smoke of the
skirmish – all the mulling, musing and endless
scribbling suddenly began to make sense and I
surprised myself by being able to pen a dozen
pages of apparently coherent rules that made a
reasonable impression of the nuts and bolts of
what I appeared to need.
What was important was that now I had
something specific to organise my project
around; that could make sense of my preferred
bases and unit sizes and, indeed, markers – and
my terrain pieces, too.
POST 158
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