Napoleon's Battles 4th Edition Review

The 4th Edition of Napoleon's Battles had finally been released!

Why am I so excited? This is, in my personal opinion, THE rules set by which grand tactical wargaming in the Napoleonic era has been measured for over 25 years. The first edition of Napoleon's Battles was published by Avalon Hill and packaged as part of their book shelf series. When Avalon Hill was bought and ceased to exist, many worried that the demise of the rules set had come. Luckily Bob Coggins and Craig Taylor, the game designers, were able to acquire the rights to the rules and two further iterations of the rules have been published.
Sadly, Bob and Craig are no longer among us, but Bob placed the rights to the game in the hands of Javier Gámez and Antonio Diaz. This will let Napoleon's Battles live on for the next generation of young Napoleons and Wellingtons to test their mettle.

First Impressions:

Napoleon's Battles is being distributed by Caliverbooks in the UK. The price was £36.50 plus shipping and handling. The ordering process was simple and I received my shipment within 6 days of placing the order here in the United States. Caliver has never disappointed me with orders and their service is great.
I understand that On Military Matters will be offering distribution in the U.S., but this old gamer did not have the patience to wait.
The rules arrive as a single hardback book, 184 pages long. The standard to the production and quality is on a par with the released publications of Warlord Games and Games Workshop. The text is easily legible and and the rules are clearly subdivided.
The book is divided into the following sections:

Introductory Material, 25 pages
Standard Rules, 38 pages
Optional Rules, 39 pages
Scenarios and Battles, 22 pages and
Scenarios and Charts, 53 pages

Many of my comparions will reference back to the earlier editions of Napoleon's Battles, especially the 3rd edition, as many of you probably already own an earlier version. For those of you that have, here is a quick overview of the Napoleon's Battles.

Napoleon's Battles is grand tactical game of miniature wargaming. What does this mean? The rules are written with the idea that you are a commander, ideally a Corps or Army commander attempting to defeat your opponent on a large battle field. The main combat element in this game is generally the "brigade". A brigade is defined as between 3 and 7 stands of infantry. This is the equivalent. of appoximatly 1400-3400 men. This can be a regiment in some armies or multiple regiments combined to create a force large enough to match this size. The rules can be used for multiple scale sized figures and the Introductory m\Material section gives good guidelines as to how to make this happen.The key component of Napoleon's Battles is the use of generals and command and control. Unlike many games where the general is only vaguely important for being "in command" and is more important for attached combat modifiers, this system makes them the center piece of maneuver and morale. The quality of your general and the country's inherent command structure is what determines the ability of your command to be be a maneuverable attacker, or loans itself better to a defensive posture. The lowest general represented in the game is the divisional general.

If you are looking for the detail of company and battalion formations with skirmishers,etc. This is not the game for you. You (the upper level commander) are not concerned with those details and are concerned with moving divisions and corps against your enemy.

The Rules:

Although reorganized to be clearer the turn organization has remained mostly unchanged. Several "steps" in each phase as listed and clearly marked as optional when using specific rules, such as the optional weather rules. Many of the rules descriptions have been re-written to make them clearer and leave less misunderstanding. This has been well done and has eliminated a lot of page flipping to find a rule. ALL movement is now clearly separated out and marked in Chapter 4, Movement Phase. The prior editions had many movement rules interspersed in the combat section, making it difficult to find those rules at time.
The rules use quite a few pictures to clarify the meaning of rules. This rules set used actual photos of figures and graphics to display meaning, making it clear for the miniature gamer. Although there are some ways the rules are written that make it clear this was not written by native speaker, it is clear what their meaning is. The rules have been proof read and on a first read through there are no blatant misspelling and grammatical errors that would impact the enjoyment of reading the rules.

The historical scenarios provided are much smaller in scale than the prior edition's release. As they are integrated into the book, the format limits the ability to make the size larger. The downside? The OOB for the armies are very small and can be difficult to read for many people. Although label and stats are provided the stats are equally difficult to read. This problem continues on when you get tot the information sheets provided beginning at page 157. There is a lot of data squeezed into a small space. The pattern continues on the Game Card. The size of the text makes the sheet not very usable as quick reference as many players will be peering over it closely to try to read it. The designers will be offering PDF versions of the Data Sheets and the Game Card online soon and hopefully they will be more legible.

In the back of the book are provided sheets with Templates that can be photocopied as well as markers for Rout, Disorder, React, etc. These would also be nice as a printable format online, and may follow in the future. The templates are the same as the earlier editions, so the nice hard clear templates that the prior publisher sold can still be used.

Changes from Prior Editions in the Standard Rules:

Passage of Lines: Prior to this edition, movement through friendly units was free. That has changed in this edition. A unit will still become disordered passing through a disordered or routed unit. That has not changed. The big change is when a combat unit (infanty,cavalry) passes through a friendly combat unit. The moving unit will now pay a movement cost as if passing through rough terrain for whatever depth of the unit they pass through. This will dramatically impact the quick passage of a rear guard up through a compact divisional command, but will only minimally affect a column passing through a formation deployed in line.

Artillery Fire on Built Up Areas: The new edition has added the feature that allows for artillery to permanently reduce the cover modifier and area offers. If the firing artillery doubles a unit's modified roll, not only does the unit take the designated casualty, but it also reduces that area's modifier by -1 down to 0. In addition, if the damage occurs, a die roll is made to determine if a fire occurs. If it does, a unit in the area automatically becomes disordered, and at the end of the fire phase must attempt to put the fire out.

General Fire modifier on BUAs: In order to inflict a casualty on a unit in a BUA you must double their roll, both for Artillery and combat units. This will make it much harder to dislodge a unit without assaulting the area.

Fighting in Build up Areas: Infantry units fighting over an area will fight with their line combat modifiers, both attacker and defender. A unit deployed in a town must be doubled in order to have a casualty inflicted.

All-Out attack and dismounted cavalry are now optional rules.

Optional Rules worth looking into:

Optional rally rules. A unit normally must rally only when a general is attached. With this rule a -3 modifier is taken to represent the lack of a higher level commander present. If a an unmodified 10 is rolled things go REALLY bad and a unit performs a rout move of at least 1/2 its rout distance toward the table edge and take another casualty.

Multiple Player Games: This is a new addition, allowing for the usage of mutliple players on each side to add the difficulty of battlefield communication. Orders and messages are used to discuss information between commands on the friendly side. Messengers are used and only when your "personal commander" and the teammates "personal commander" are touching on the tabletop make you discuss freely. This is recommended to be a timed action to eliminate long letter writing. Messengers may be killed and messages intercepted.

Moving Artillery Modifier: I love this rule, this limited the effect of creeping artillery fire, adding an additional -2 modifier if ANY movement factors are used.

Double Batteries: This addresses the infamous Russian effect very well. A battery of 10-12 guns will now take 3 hits vs 2, and only be -2 with a casualty/-4 with 2 vs a -3 with a normal battery and 1 hit.

Abilities: They have listed almost two pages of abilities to add to units at a cost from the standard unit cost. This can be positive and negative and the opponent does not know these abilities before the battle starts. This considered to add "fog of war" to the game. I could see this easily for scenario building where units performed above or below their usual effectiveness.

There is much more than what I have listed here, but if its peaked your interest please give the rules a try.

All-in-all this is a great set of rules that are worth the price asked by Caliver books. The packaging is well done and seems durable, the type is clear to read and the structure well organized, and the rules changes make for some intriguing changes to the tactics of fighting. I look forward to trying the rules changes on the table top and seeing their effect on the game.

Until next time, Enjoy and Happy Gaming.