Next on the ping pong table, we set up Jack Culverson's 15mm Napoleonic game. Napoleon's expedition against the Turks. In playing on the side of the French, I discovered that the Turks were fairly powerful foes... I thought Jack had worked in some sort of advantage for the French, but I never found it. The key to Jack's game is in the sequence. Each side is given a deck of 10 cards, and they are alternately drawn... on the cards is noted the particular function the side may perform: rally, or advance, or move, or close to contact, or fire, etc., etc. The function on the card is "free" ... all units on that side are free to perform it. But the sequence has a clever "override" system built in. If, for example, a "Fire' card is drawn, but a particular Brigade Commander doesn't want all of his troops to fire, but some to close with the enemy, then he plays one of several "override" markers he's assigned, and announces that not only are some of his troops firing but that others are closing instead of firing. The Brigade Commander can go even further. He can play yet another marker, and declare that one or two of his units are rallying. As long as he plays markers, he can deviate from the 11freebeell orders noted on the drawn card. Each marker entitles him to yet another function. Every Brigade Commander receives from 2 to 4 markers, which he plays during the draws of the 10 card sequence deck. When all 10 cards have been played, and the turn is over, he now dices to see if he gets back as many markers as he played. As the turns go on, therefore, and he receives fewer and fewer markers back, his ability to deviate from the function listed on the drawn sequence card is reduced. The scenario placed the Turks in 2 redoubts, each well fortified with a battery of 4 guns. These guns were bad stuff... any enemy unit approaching within short range (less than 12 inches) had 2 stands immediately blown away. Casualties in the game were not in terms of figures, but in terms of complete stands. Considering that a battalion only consisted of 3 stands, the guns were powerful stuff! Two bumps, and your unit was essentially out of the game. The casualty calculations for the guns followed along these lines: One starts with the status level of the 4-gun battery, which was defined as 3. Add to this any pertinent modifiers. In this case, the only one was a +2 for short range artillery fire (12 inches or less). This gives a net resultant of 5. Take the 5, multiply it by 4 guns, and get 20. Each 10- point total indicates a full stand destroyed. The 20, therefore, indicates that 2 stands are knocked out. At long range (up to 24 inches), the status of 3 is not modified. Multiplying it by the 4 guns gives a product of 12. This results in 1 stand destroyed and a 20 percent probability of a second. Still a fairly powerful weapon. The reason I know all this is that I launched my French Cavalry Brigade, 3 regiments strong, in a frontal attack on the redoubt. My excuse: "I was testing the rules!" And in another "test", my Hussars bashed into a Turkish square. The calculations indicated this was bad for the Hussars... so bad that I removed them from the table. Jeff Wiltrout and I, as joint French commanders, tried valiantly, in a series of frontal attacks, to remove the Turks from their guns in the redoubts. All we heard was Turkish laughter... I think all agreed that the firepower, in a game in which whole stands were removed, was too great. Back to PW Review January 1992 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1992 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com