The secret is out. I've discovered why the COURIER and MWAN and LONE WARRIOR lead the money makers in the MAGWEB listings. Remember that the magazine with the most 'hits' makes the most money. The PW REVIEW has, perhaps, four or five articles per issue. Some of the articles will describe, on occasion, more than one battle, but this still means that after giving the REVIEW a mere 5 'hits', you've read the entire issue. But now look at the other magazines. Each of them lists many different categories, and under each category, there are several individual listings. For example, under the heading of 'rules reviews', there could be a listing of some 5 rules sets. And so you 'hit' one of them, bring it up on your screen, and discover a three-sentence description of a rules set. Then, it's on to the next 'review', the next 'hit', and you see another three-sentence summary. And so on. Which means that to read the 5 three-sentence reviews, you've given the magazine 5 'hits'. Multiply this by the number of categories, and you've got a winner. I've noted that, on occasion, MAGWEB gives the PW REVIEW the benefit of the doubt. For example, in an article in which I've described two battles, MAGWEB might break the article in two parts, each requiring a 'hit' to read. But it's obvious that I've got to go further than that. I've got to break up all the articles in the REVIEW into at least ten different listings. And so, to expand these listings, each article should be 'parsed' out... I've got to have an introduction, a brief biography of the author, a section on the designer's notes, another section devoted to the firing procedures, then the melee procedures, and so on. Yes, we've got to fight fire with fire. 2. In this issue is a description of a Napoleonic set of rules, derived from the DBX procedures. Over the years, I've seen a couple of such derived procedures, and all of them have failed the test. Unfortunately, the rules described in this issue falls into the failed-test category. One might think that if DBX was, indeed, applicable to Napoleonics, that Phil Barker would have hopped on the wagon long ago. To my mind, the DBX system seems to work only because each stand, each element, is an entity unto itself. It marches alone, it melees alone, and if it is a missile unit, it fires alone. If it happens to find itself beside another friendly stand, it may be temporarily assisted, but only temporarily. There are virtually no 'units' under DBX... the only concession to the unit concept occurs in DBR, wherein you can ally a pike stand with a musket stand. This means that in an era where multi-stand units are a necessity, DBX and its clones are out. And this completely shoots down the Napoleonic era for the DBX system. Back to PW Review April 1999 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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