Tales from the Vienna Woods

Last Days of the Grande Armee

Reviewed by Markus Stumptner

Last Days of the Grande ArmeeThis was another major disappointment. It was designed by Kevin Zucker, published by OSG, and covers the Waterloo campaign at a semi-operational level, with several turns per day. I bought it in the expectation that it was part of a series, which it is, and therefore would present us with a seasoned and polished game system. However, the series underwent quite a bit of evolution with this game and as a result the rules appear untested; they are full of holes. There is a large amount of Q&A already available on the Internet, but what was interesting was that most of the questions found were not handled. Nonetheless from the comments I have seen, most people seem fairly happy with the accuracy of the game. This difference appears to be due to our starting with the second scenario (which has the morning of Waterloo as the first turn), whereas most people start with the initial turns of the campaign. If they do this the campaign will of course not follow the historical course exactly and therefore it's not as easy to compare the game to the historical situation. The second scenario instead gives one the opportunity to step right into a major battle (Waterloo and the approach to Wavre), and that we did.

We then observed (a) numerous irregularities and gaps in the rules, such as that the terrain effects in the rules, the examples, and on the terrain effects chart contradict each other (there are three different modifiers given for towns), (b) that the historical Waterloo setup, used as the starting point for scenario 2, would be impossible to achieve in the game (because units cannot start in enemy ZOCs on a morning turn), and (c) that the course of the battle bears no relation to reality. Leaders and units zip around with abandon. The first I could forgive, the other two are quite irritating. One of the selling points of the game for me was its scale between operational and tactical level, so that some detail of larger battles could come out; they also last multiple turns. Unfortunately, the basis of the combat system is right out of the 1970s and even if the results were acceptable (they are not), there is no resemblance to a real battle in the movement that goes on.

Abandoning the attempt to make sense of Waterloo after the morning assault of the French guards had ZOC'ed and DR'ed Wellington back beyond Mont St Jean, on the other side of the map we found that the elan rule means that Grouchy has a not so low chance of being delayed for about eight hours by a single Prussian brigade in his way. This is so because the first stack to engage does so at relatively low odds, and if that engagement dieroll fails the first stack does not enter the ZOC, and the next stack also arrives at low odds and so on. It is still not the most likely case, but if it occurs (as it of course did in our game), quite irritating. We decided to play on without the elan rule. However, other problems kept piling up and we eventually gave up.

As mentioned there are numerous errata available, including some that attempt to address the impossibility of the 2nd scenario setup (e.g., a special rule so that the delayed Waterloo bombardment can occur in the game), but still would not make the setup consistent with the game rules. Of course this matters only to someone who would look at the history. The most telling indication of lack of playtesting that we found was the infinite loop in the combat trules - if a guards unit attacks a chateau with one unit in it, and gets a DE result, the chateau changes that to an EX result which the guard changes back to to a DE and so on. In a sense one could say we're still playing the game, we just never made it out of that one combat phase. NB the rules list six playtesters and seven (!) rule editors. There are some quite experienced individuals in those groups, but one does get the impression their input was not really integrated by someone in charge. Sad. For those who want to play the game: start with the initial scenario, by the time the battles come around you will have a situation sufficiently different from the historical one so you won't note how out of whack everything is.

Our trust in Kevin Zucker was given back to us by Bonaparte in Italy and Napoleon at Bay, both of which we played after LDotGA. Both played very well, and the overall course followed by both games seemed believable. Very enjoyable (well, in both games both sides always moaned about how bad their situation was, but that's part of the fun and to me, generally, a sign of a challenging game).

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© Copyright 2001 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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