At a recent HMGS convention, I was lucky enough to participate in a battle using GRAND ARMEE (GA), a set of Napoleonic rules written by Sam Mustafa. GA is about to be published by Quantum Press, run by Dave Waxtel, who published such winners as FIRE & FURY, TACTICA, and SPEAR HEAD.
The booklet I saw contained around 40 pages, and I assume that when it’s fully published, it’ll come out with a glossy color front cover, lots of pictures, and glossy pages inside… the typical Waxtel-winner format.
GA is a grand-grand tactical set… Sam refuses to specify a distance or time scale. In the game in which I participated, a 3-inch by 3-inch stand of 25mm troops, loaded with lots of figures, represented a brigade. Somewhat similar to VOLLEY & BAYONET, which, to me, fell flat in its attempt to portray a grand scale game. Not so for GA. I like big, klunky, heavy 3-inch by 3-inch stands, and GA’s configuration is fine with me.
The only distance firing weapons in GA is artillery… the guns range out to about 16 inches, depending upon the type of battery. Musket fire is subsumed into the melee procedures.
The heart of GA is the command-and-control (C&C) system, in which the sides dice for a number of C&C chitties. In our battle, in which I was an Austrian commander, way out on the Austrian right flank, my Division general, who commanded 10 brigades (10 stands), required 5 C&C chitties to enable his entire division to advance. This was an all-or-nothing requirement… less than 5 chitties and my general’s divisional force was dormant.
The Austrian Big Cheese had a total of around 30 chitties to distribute. And so, on the first phase, the Big Guy gave all divisions their requisite number of chitties, to get everyone moving. This left him with some 15 chitties. The French commander diced for his own chitties, handed them out, and the French forces moved. Then, it was back to the Austrians, and here, with his lesser number of chitties, our Big Guy had to make a number of tactical decisions concerning which divisions he wanted to move up.
The kicker here was that neither side knew in advance when this first phase would be over and a supply of new chitties arrive to begin a second phase.
One of the sub-phases within the sequence called for both sides to have their skirmishers advance and harass the opposition. Remember that there were no musket fire provisions, and so, to get some sort of long range effect, other than artillery, a side could strike out with its skirmishers. A brigade within 6 inches of an enemy stand could send out its skirmishers and blast away.
Wonder of wonders! Not a casualty cap to be seen! GA used data sheets for each of its brigade stands. For the 10 brigades within my division, I had to track the 10 units. This was easily done. Each brigade started with anywhere from 6 to 10 strength points, and when they were reduced to zero, the unit was termed “broken”. In melee, the number of strength points in a brigade affected the number of dice you tossed.
In short, my assessment of GA is around a 9.5 on a scale of 1-to-10.
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© Copyright 2002 Wally Simon
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