Normally, I wouldn’t have bothered with this game, as I had already bludgeoned the system into the Intensive Care room back in BROG, when it was called Napoleon’s First Battles. However, several people on Genie and AoL expressed a fair amount of joy in playing it, saying it had been updated sufficiently, was easy, and, best of all, fun. So, I figured I’d check it out to see if it really had improved any. Add to that the fact that I am now working on my own, “easy play” Napoleonic stuff, a package which will include Austerlitz, so I was most interested in seeing if there was anything of Joe’s I could, uh, borrow. Alas, it hasn’t, and there wasn’t. Joe Miranda’s awkwardly titled Emperor’s First Battles - XTR has dropped Latin, so, I assume, Doc D decided to go one better and eliminate “articles;” sounds more like the early life of a race horse - covers Austerlitz and Jena-Auerstadt at 500 meters a hex, another piece of awkwardness, as it is not a happy scale for Napoleonics, and what do you need all that space for at Austerlitz? Aside from the boxcover, it looks nice enough. Beth Queman’s counters are clear and colorful, although less like military units than a bowl of M&Ms. And it would help if one managed to spell the names of all the leaders correctly. (It’s Bessieres, not Bessmeres, and Lefebure [sic] and Sulspice [even sic-er} don’t fare much better. The maps are more handy than eye-pleasing, more inclined to clarity than accuracy. Then again, maps have never been Joe’s forte. That I disagree with some of his terrain interpretations is, most likely, a matter for scholarly discussion. That the woods look like invading amoebas and the frozen ponds like toilet bowls filled with Ping-Pong balls is another matter entirely. The basic premise of the system is to provide an accessible game system that plays easily. Nice, if you can get it, but, here, accessibility far too often becomes a simple-mindedness that keeps burying a dagger into the back of historicity, leaving the latter lurking in the background like an uninvited relative at a wedding party. All of this can be gleaned instantly when noting the “Overlord” primateur on the boxcover, or what I call Le Mortmain Baggett. Where Larry treads, history has fled. We won’t linger too long over the details. It’s Igo-Hugo, with a primitive command structure laid over bombard-move-assault. I mention the latter sequence if only to note that artillery units can do all three in one turn. Amusing. Add in a 2000 meter range for some guns, about twice the distance they ever fired in battle, and you have an artillery system more suited to Magic than anything the old Corsican ever imagined. The CRT, while being a variant of the old AE/DE type not often found these days, does have enough variety to make it worthwhile. But infantry units can still attack cavalry at will, something that almost never happened in this era, an historical oversight only partially ameliorated by a new (and nice) countercharge rule, enabling cavalry to lash out, if not at the designer, at anything else that dares to enter their ZOC. If they can gallop forward, why can’t they gallop rearwards, hmmm? Shock, itself, is standard odds-ratio, grunt-and-stab, with the designated attacking - but not defending - “lead unit” adding its Elan rating to the DR. Makes for some interesting choices, as any so designated unit is the first to get bopped. Less interesting is a Road March rate of up to 6000 meters for commanded infantry; that’s 3 and 1/2 miles an hour. Sounds a bit much to me, especially for the ponderous Russians, whose idea of movement was to roll their eyeballs. Doesn’t matter much, as there’s only one road of note on the Austerlitz map. And Joe’s optional Friction rule, his version of Random Events, is far too generic to have any “élan”. Some are outright silly, when taken in context with what’s happening on the field. Random visibility?? As for the battles, I didn’t play Auerstadt, but Austerlitz presents many problems to the designer if he is going to simulate history even minimally, which level the system manages to reach only with difficulty. That problem, the inability of the huge Russo-Austrian army to either act or react, is simply ignored. So ,what you get may be fun, if you like this sort of thing, but it ain’t Austerlitz. It’s more like the Somme, with huge walls of units stretching across the center of the map. As if that weren’t enough insult to reality, Miranda has the Coalition Boys go first. What results is a huge mid-map traffic jam, while everyone on the fringes tries flanking maneuvers to the north and south into areas that, on my map sources, appear to be militarily impenetrable. The whole thing looks less like a Napoleonic battle than sale day at Filene’s Basement. One of Joe’s Friction Table results is “Intelligence”. If you use this rule and manage to roll this “event”, I suggest you use yours to move onto something more rewarding. CAPSULE COMMENTS Graphic Presentation: Nice, but not overly evocative. Playability: Quite good. Rules are, as promised, accessible and clear. Replayability: Only if you view accessibility and clarity as the sole reasons to play. Historicity: I draw a shade over the rotting corpse …. Creativity: Minimal Wristage: On par with Creativity, thankfully. Comparisons: It’s better than Zucker’s old-hat stuff, but it’s running way behind the rest of the competition. There are better ways to spend a Napoleonic evening. Overall: Disappointingly dismal. Even worse, nothing to steal. from DECISION/OVERLORD GAMES 2 22” x 33” maps; 480 counters; Rules Book; Player Aid Card. Boxed. $30, from Decision Games, POB 4049, Lancaster CA 93539. Back to Berg's Review of Games Vol. II # 21 Table of Contents Back to Berg's Review of Games List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by Richard Berg This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com