Almost ten years ago, a game designer appeared at several HMGS conventions, pushing his boxed game TAKE THE HIGH GROUND. This was a simple board game played on a 17x22 field, with different plastic figures representing infantry and cavalry and artillery. He claimed you could re-create Napoleonic warfare with his game, but alas!… not too many people believed him and he soon vanished from the scene. LE PETIT EMPEREUR (LPE) was published in 1995 by Chipco, designed by Chip Harrison, and in the introduction, Harrison states that LPE is … the fast play rules set for the Napoleonic gamer… LPE is designed to be fun, so many of the characteristics of the period are comprehended in the overall rules and not on a detail level in order to simplify play and speed the game along. Like HIGH GROUND, LPE also has infantry and cavalry and artillery tokens, but right there, like HIGH GROUND, its resemblance to Napoleonic warfare ends. In essence, LPE is an attempt to create a DBA version of Napoleonics… whereas the DBA rules utilize a mix of 12 tokens on the field, LPE uses 24 tokens, which is termed an army. For 15mm figures, the stand size is a square measuring 11/2 inches per side. For 25mm figures, the stand size is a 3 inch square. Regardless of which basing method you use, the movement rates and firing ranges are the same. I happen to like big, klunky stands, and the large bases of 3-inch squares appeal to me. When I first looked at VOLLEY AND BAYONET, there, too, I discovered nice, big klunky stands, but my joy was short-lived, and I decided that VOLLEY AND BAYONET was not ready for prime time. The same for LPE. Starting with the 24-stand army, LPE defines one stand, one base, as a “unit”. That’s as far as it goes. How many men are in a “unit”?… your guess is as good as mine. Then LPE defines a group of bases (units) that are touching as a “corps”. This means that the makeup of your “corps” varies from turn to turn as you move your stands around the field, combining and re-combining the bases. The terminology is awkward… LPE’s corps have absolutely nothing to do with Napoleonic corps. LPE, of course, provides an army list, and Fred Haub and I jointly commanded a Prussian army, and faced a French army headed by Tony Figlia. Initially, each side had 4 infantry corps and 2 cavalry corps. When a unit is in combat, and takes casualties, there are several possibilities. Combat is fought stand-on-stand, a la DBA, with each side tossing a 6-sided die and adding certain modifiers. a. If the 2 modified die rolls are equal, there’s no effect… the stands remain locked in combat. b. If your modified die roll exceeds your opponent’s, his stand is demoralized… it receives a casualty cap, and the stands remain locked in combat. If a stand is demoralized twice in a row, it’s “doubly demoralized”… yet another casualty cap appears on it. A “doubly demoralized” stand must ‘step back’ one base width. And, shades of DBA, if there’s another stand already in back of it, and the retreating stand steps on the other stand’s toes, the retreating stand is destroyed. c. If your modified die roll is twice that of your opponent’s, you destroy his stand. The presence of casualty caps, I should note, immediately transforms LPE into a Class A Abomination… as the battle progresses, the field becomes saturated with these ugly, ugly, ugly caps … Yuch! Pfeh! Phooey! In the middle of the field, halfway between our armies, was a crucial bit of terrain… a small ridge. Tony’s Frenchmen quickly took control of the ridge. This was critical, since the victory point tally at game’s end gives 10 points for every line infantry stand destroyed, 15 points for every elite cavalry stand destroyed, and so on… but it gives 40 points to the side possessing the critical terrain item. Due to the scale (what scale?) of the game, there’s no musketry… musketry is subsumed in the stand-to-stand combat procedures. But there is long range artillery fire up to 8 inches. The sequence has Side A rallying its troops (removing demoralization markers), then firing artillery, then moving, and then there’s resolution of combat for stands in contact. Then Side B follows suit to complete the bound. There’s no defensive fire… this is a typical basic board-game sequence. Fred and I advanced our Prussians to take Tony’s ridge away from him. Both sides tried to extend their lines, attempting to have no second-rank stands… we both feared the “doubly demoralized” step back, wherein you die if you step on your buddy’s toes. And Fred and I got the pants beat off us. Tony’s dice tosses carried the day… he won melee after melee after melee, and we placed marker after marker on our stands. And here’s where we encountered LPE’s only unique and clever touch, a ploy in which LPE has the two opposing armies compare the damage they did to each other each half-turn. At the end of the half bound, after Side A - or Side B - has finished its sequenced routines, each adds up a number of points. Note these are different form the listing of victory points I previously described. These end-of-half-bound points have only to do with damage inflicted within a given half-bound. 1 point for every enemy unit your side demoralized 2 points for every enemy unit you destroyed. The side with the higher total is defined as winning the half-bound. And the losing side gets to adjust its “Morale Clock”. Again, the terminology is awkward… it’s not really a ‘clock’… it’s a measurement and count-down of the morale level of the entire army. Each side starts with a ‘clock’ level of 9, and the loser of the half-bound reduces his clock level by one. When one side’s clock gets down to zero, the battle is over… and the victory points described above are assessed. I must announce we didn’t follow LPE’s procedure for clock reduction by the half-bound… in truth, I didn’t notice this until the battle was over. What we actually did was to go through a complete bound before we adjusted the sides’ clocks. And what happened was that, bound after bound, our Prussian army clock kept going down and down and down. From 9 to 8 to 7 to 6, etc… it was embarrassing. It wasn’t until our own clock was way down to a level of 3 that we finally caused a reduction to Tony’s level… we reduced him to a clock level of 8. Big deal! We found the clocking ploy to be quite interesting… it gives you a visual indication that you’re in trouble, that disaster is impending. I might try this type of keeping a running total of army morale in my own rules. But around Bound #3 we Prussians, seeing we were in so much trouble and about to give up the ghost, we decided to ‘sacrifice’ our general for the cause. Each side has one Commanding General, who, if attached to a unit, prevents the unit from becoming demoralized… the only way to produce an impact on a protected unit, since you can’t demoralize it, is to destroy it. LPE permits you to sacrifice your general to increase your clock number by a maximum of 3. Simply toss a 6-sided die at the beginning of your half-bound, and if the result is more than the points you wanted to add, the attempt is successful. Fred and I were so deep in trouble that we went for broke… we tried to add the maximum… 3 clock points… but our die roll was a 2, and so, not only were we unsuccessful, but our general died in vain… contributing nothing to the cause. Once we caught the hang of LPE’s sequence, the game went rapidly. The LPE rules fill out 6 pages, and there can be lots of unanswered questions. For example, we had trouble finding out if you can be in melee with artillery. It turns out you can.. but the answer was troublesome to find, because there were 2 answers. If the artillery stand is attached to an infantry stand, it adds plus 1 to the infantry’s combat roll, and suffers the fate of the infantry stand. But if the artillery is independent, standing alone, and is charged, then the melee is treated differently from the other types of combat. The artillery tosses a 6-sided die: A toss of 1 or 2 The charging unit is destroyed. A toss of 3 or 4 The charging unit halts and becomes demoralized. A toss of 5 or 6 The artillery is destroyed At the end of the battle, when our Prussian clock went to zero, we tallied victory points. Tony totaled 300 victory points, we totaled only 115… a superior victory for the French and a route for the Prussians! But for LE PETIT EMPEREUR… we gave it a 3 on a scale of 1-to-10. Back to PW Review May 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com