Below is an article featuring Commands & Colors: Napoleonics insights and first impressions from first time player and InsideGMT contributor David Wiley of Swords and Chit and Cardboard Clash. You can also find this article on David’s blog. Enjoy! -Rachel
Welcome to Swords and Chit! My aim is to focus on discussing and reviewing wargames. There are two primary reasons I wanted to start blogging about my wargaming experience: as a relatively new wargamer coming from a background of euro games, a lot of things in the wargaming hobby are going to be new to me and I hope to provide a fresh voice for those who might be on a similar journey into this area of gaming. Second, I have a very strong preference for games set in the Medieval period or earlier – although that isn’t where I’ll exclusively play, it is what I will focus on more than anything else. So I am glad you discovered this blog, and I hope you stick around for future posts!
In an effort to regain my currentness with the games being played with my opponent, I wanted to jump ahead to cover our most recent venture and our second dip into the Commands & Colors series of games. This happens to be the first game that we’ve explored a series title with, which is hard to believe given what we’ve covered so far for games. I have a feeling that the Men of Iron series or the Undaunted series will be the next one to claim that, although Table Battles has a shot at stealing the trophy with Dino TB waiting in the wings.
Anyway, we pulled out and played Commands & Colors: Napoleonics earlier this week, partially because we both dig the C&C system and partly to help play something more modern than the string of ancients/medieval titles I usually push to see the table. This is a period of military history that I am woefully ignorant about, having almost minimal knowledge about Napoleon or the finer details of what he did. Let’s hope this becomes the first step toward erasing that gap in my knowledge, right? We played the first scenario in the book, Rolica (French First Position), 17 August 1808. I took the British Army, allowing him to play as the French, without knowing the historical outcome for the scenario ahead of time. And, well, this game FELT DIFFERENT than Ancients. Like putting Peanut Butter & Jelly on a Cinnamon Sugar bagel, there was a level of familiarity here yet a whole new experience compared to a PB&J Sandwich. My son may have had that bagel this morning, so forgive the food reference.
The historical outcome played out, but it always felt close. My English Army had a chance to gain and hold two different hills behind his line to gain points, but I was never able to hold one for a full turn to even get that temporary point value on the board. It turned out that I didn’t need it, and ultimately I just wiped out enough of his guys to secure the victory. It didn’t hurt that I had extraordinary luck with card draws, and he had subpar luck at times with die rolls (apart from a very early 4-hit roll that wiped one of my units to draw first blood). So let’s get into some of the things I learned here:
Insight #1: Terrain plays a major impact, so plan accordingly
I had no idea, coming into the play, just how different the terrain played out in this version of the game. And wow, what an impact it made (beyond the added step in setup to find the tiles to place on the map). Depending on the unit type you are using, there’s a possible modifier to the number of dice rolled based on whether attacking uphill, attacking downhill, attacking hill-to-hill, attacking into woods, attacking out of woods, attacking into/out of a city, etc. Little details, but ones that severely impact your decisions on what units to use, move, and position. Yes, I’d like my Light Infantry to position themselves in this forest, where they gain all the benefit of cover as protection from your return fire.
Insight #2: Ranged Attacks now matter
In Ancients, I made the observation that a ranged attack almost always felt like a wasted attack, because its odds of connecting were really low. And while waltzing up to your opponent’s troops and smacking them in melee still usually lets you roll more dice, it becomes easier to target the lowly infantry (they have 2 sides on each die) and therefore you have a decent odds of hitting when they are the target. While the range overall is small for ranged attacks, it no longer feels like an inferior play because there’s at least one group you can target to hit more often. Plus, there’s one other significant alteration that plays into the effectiveness of a ranged attack…
Insight #3: Dice rolled are tied to the strength of a unit’s force
This is the biggest game changer, at least in my books, for what makes the Napoleonics a very different game than Ancients. I’ll be really curious, as we explore the other C&C titles out there, to see if any of the others adopted this one, but the strength of a force is tied to the number of blocks remaining in the force. This means every hit matters in the game, as it is one less die they can roll against you (usually, exceptions so far being artillery and some ranged – artillery weakens when down to 1 block, while ranged attacks typically involve rolling dice to half the force strength so depending on the rounding a single loss may not change the next attack but does get it closer to dropping another die off). And boy does this make all sorts of sense. Gone are the moments where a single Roman Heavy Infantry block can stand tall and swing 5 dice at the enemy, cutting down swaths of foes even in its depleted state. There’s a trade-off with this change, of course, as generally someone on a losing side would prefer the Ancients method of constant die rolling. But it changes so much, especially on how you choose to target units. Then factor in the terrain and its possible negatives to dice rolled, and it can lead to ineffective units limping around the battlefield, unable to strike back if your melee attack misses.
Insight #4: Positioning of troops matters more than ever
Forget the terrain factor for a moment, because that (as I mentioned) already provides a meaty tactical factor on the battlefield which a good general needs to consider. Yes, using that effectively can reap you increasingly greater rewards in the long run. However, there’s another fun nuance in this one that can enter into the tactical decision space: engagement locking. What I mean by that is a unit adjacent to an enemy unit cannot choose to instead shoot at a distant unit, it must choose to target a unit adjacent when possible. So imagine how you can position your troops to protect a vulnerable, or valuable, unit moving past some enemy troops. Add in the fact that almost every unit – at least on this first battle – can only move a hex per turn and it could become a real challenge to try and pivot out of a positional nightmare. This is a neat little rule, and one I intend to abuse the hell out of as I grow in military tactical levels.
Insight #5: At the end of the day, even the best plan rarely survives contact with the enemy
Ultimately this game still boils down to degrees of luck. You need the right cards to do the right moves. You need to roll well. And, more importantly, your opponent needs to do the right things you want them to do. The movement of non-cavalry units is so sluggish at a single hex per turn to where everything unfolds as if caught in a river of molasses. It was frustrating at times, because the faster pace of Ancients movement meant a unit in the back, or off to the side, could oftentimes find an opportune time to sweep in and make a strong push. Not so here. You’ll need to plan and plan some more on how to advance your troops, and eventually either the cards or the dice or the things your opponent does will lead you to a point where that master plan is no longer quite so good. I had a card all game that would let every troop in melee range activate. And every time I got a 4th or 5th troop in melee, inevitably something would happen before my next turn. Units would die off on both sides, someone would retreat, and the landscape would change drastically. The battle ended with it still in my hand, unable to justify playing it for only 2 activations because I always had something equally good I could use instead, oftentimes to try and reposition the battlefield so I could play said card next turn. Ah well, there’s still next battle…
Wrap-Up
I’ve written a fair amount about Commands & Colors: Ancients, and it quickly became one of my favorite Wargames in our collection. I heard through the grapevine that Napoleonics is better, and while I won’t go as far as to make that claim (yet) since there’s a lot of scenarios (and expansions) to play in them both, I can say this is a different game. It feels like a new game, while having the same familiarity of the Commands & Colors system in tact. And while we have Medieval, The Great War, BattleLore, and Red Alert waiting in the wings…something tells me those will all have to wait while we explore a few more plays of Napoleonics, switching sides and getting through at least a few scenarios before dipping our toes into the next reimplementation of the C&C system. I am genuinely excited to see this one hit the table again soon, much like how I felt when Ancients finally clicked for me. This is a great system, and a promising game…
Now I need to figure out a good book to pick up as a companion to these plays…
Previous Articles:
A New Wargamer’s Reflections on Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan
A New Wargamer’s Insights and Impressions from Peloponnesian War
A New Wargamer’s Insights and Impressions from Nevsky: Teutons and Rus in Collision, 1240-1242
A New Wargamer’s Insights and Impressions from Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain
A New Wargamer’s Insights and Impressions from Holland ’44
Author: David Wiley
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