In my freshman year my friend, George Petronis, introduced me to an old friend of his, Craig Taylor. Craig went on to write a good number of wargames, the most influential of which was Napoleon’s Battles. Frankly, I dismissed it when I was in New York because—-a tactician at heart—-I felt it had too many shortcomings. When I moved to Maryland and began to game at Chantilly, I encountered a horde of Napoleon’s Battles fans who would play nothing but, so I rebased my metal and tried my metal against theirs. Such began a long and happy relationship with the ladies and gentlemen of NOVAG who game at Chantilly. The game does have the advantage of enabling one to start and finish a multiple corps Napoleonics battle in the same evening you began it.

One of the Austrian corps coming through a pass.

Recently, at the First Friday Game we always host at our place, someone asked to put on a World War II game, but failed to show. The result was that I had a house full of people and no wargame, so I whipped out an idea I’d been thinking about. Napoleon had besieged Mantua, and the Austrians send columns of troops to its relief down the valleys leading down from the Tyrol. You had a static force of Austrians holding Mantua, and three invading columns. The French were scattered about, with many of their units ‘disordered’, since they were foraging. Command control for most of the columns was a nightmare, so we modified the command control rules.

The look and feel of the game was great. On one HUGE board, you had the strategic situation, grand tactical maneuver by the various forces, and could still fight tactical battles in the various valleys. One Austrian force was stopped in a narrow valley. One was crushed, while the other succeeded. When the French who had crushed the one Austrian column successfully forced marched in march column toward the French who had been beaten and were falling back, the Austrians conceded that they would never relieve Mantua. For a most impromptu game, I thought it went rather well.

Maneuvering a linear army, such as the Austrians in the 1790’s, on a strategic descent through widely separated mountain valleys against Napoleon at his height, would have been a challenge for anyone.