We have found that the enjoyment of the campaign is much enhanced if we devote an evening to a general rehash once it's over. The referee prepares a summary of events, and as he unfolds the story of the campaign, the players get to chime in with what they thought they were doing when they made that bonehead maneuver, how unfair the referee was, and how their subordinate cost them their victory. No game is truly finished until you've played the recrimination phase. What quickly becomes clear is that this limited sort of campaign does a reasonable job of creating "the other side of the hill," and that the players have strikingly different perceptions of the same situation. Making decisions based on incomplete knowledge is a skill that I particularly wanted to feature in our games, and we seem to be doing that.
The other thing that stands out is that in these campaigns battles are fought in particular places because of the geographical features of those places. Given real terrain to operate in, the players get to make real choices about where to fight, where to march, and where to rest their flanks. This is a set of problems that has been absent from too many of the campaign systems that I have used in the past. The only requirements for including them are adequate terrain on which to operate, and movement rules that integrate with your tactical rules of choice.
Players quickly learn that committing their light cavalry to battle is likely to mean that they are blind from then on. They gain an understanding of why it took so long for Napoleonic armies to deploy and mount an attack. They learned that in an era when messages walked across the face of the earth you'd better have a clear plan that your subordinates can rely on. The evidence on how fast they learn that a complicated plan of attack is a dangerous thing is less clear, but that may say more about us than the campaign.
By choosing an appropriate size of operation, providing terrain for it to occupy, and ruthlessly leaving out all the nifty factors you don't really need you can focus on the problems you want to play at solving. If you can do this, you will have an enjoyable campaign with interesting battles. Best of all, you'll generate stories with which to bore all the new members of your club for years to come.
More Napoleonic 1812 Campaigning
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