OSG published Last Days of the Grande Armee on February 15th, 1999. The game has received good reviews, most recently in Paper Wars. Inevitably it has also been criticized on the Consimworld wargaming webpage. The purpose of this article is to address some of the ideas put forward there.

First among these is "the game's rules don't appear to have been tested or edited." The game has now been out for a year and hundreds of people have played it in that time. We certainly have had questions, as we always do.

The rules folder lists seven individuals as rules editors, not including the designer. Those seven people sent in comments, suggestions, criticisms, and clarifications. Most of their observations were incorporated into the rules. As playtesters we list six people-not including the designerwho played the game prior to publication.

Even with that many pairs of eyes looking at a game, not everyone is going to understand every rule. It is inevitable that people will have questions. See the Questions & Answers on page 24 and read pretty much every question we've received along with the answers. Most people actually ask different questions-only a few questions were asked by more than one person.

Much of the confusion focused on a single optional rule- elan. First it is asked why, in the afternoon and evening, you are less likely to attack. This shows the effects of physical exhaustion of troops, without forcing the player to keep track of how far each unit has moved through the course of the day. Generally troops were at their freshest and most effective in the mornings, and yes, we could have provided a separate track to keep a record of elan by corps, but this would have increased the record-keeping beyond the modest level the design called for.

The feedback on page 12 of this issue shows that the complexity rating of this game is exactly right according to our audience: it's not too complex, nor too simplistic. It is a game that people will play. To some people nothing can be taken seriously unless it's pushing the envelope in complexity. But this is not what we are trying to do. We publish games that people can and do play.

It is an absurdity to create a game if no one is going to play it: having counters manufactured, writing the rules so that they can be used, etc. If no one is going to play the game then all that is a pointless exercise.

Besides, if a game isn't played, then it doesn't sell. What sells games is the play. OSG's mission is not achieved if customers buy a game, admire the components and then put it on their shelves and later selling it at some auction somewhere down the line. Our mission is to publish games whose components get so scuffed-up and used that they have to be replaced-the perfect example being Napoleon's Last Battles, a game many people have played over a hundred times. The goal here is not to show you all the things we know about the Waterloo campaign, but to provide an insightful experience that can be completed in one evening.

When someone says, 'Well, I haven't actually played the game, but..." or "I haven't even seen the game, but this is what I think about it..." you might want to weigh carefully what comes next. Given the nature of Consimworld, where anyone can get on and say anything, you have to take things cum grano salis. If someone has played it maybe once and lost, well ... 'It must be a bad game!'

In a regular wargame you bring all the troops you can into the battle, you build up big tall stacks and that's what wins the day. In Last Days, using the tlan rules, it doesn't work that way. You have to be careful at what times you commit lower- rated units into battle. The game is asking you to look at an aspect that is not often examined, and if you ignore that, then you're going to lose.

You've got to expect to play a game wrong the first time. When a grognard sets up a game and plays it for the first time, and gets his head handed to him, he has a strong enough ego that he doesn't have to look for a scapegoat in the designer. On the contrary, he sees an opportunity to learn something, and wants to try again, to see if he can do better now that he sees a little bit about how things work.

The question was raised as to why out of supply units are not allowed to advance after combat: "The units have already engaged in battle, why wouldn't they move forward after the enemy pulled back?" Supply doesn't mean simply food and ammunition and forage. It's not necessarily saying that 'the troops haven't been fed today so they won't advance! Food is a factor, but it's mainly a psychological effect, a morale effect: knowing that their Lines of Communications have been cut, the troops don't want to advance.

You see this time and again in the Napoleonic Wars. The word spreads when the enemy has cut our lines of communications back to our homeland, or to our base of operations where we stared the campaign, and the overwhelming urge of the troops is to get back there. Supply in Last Days is a morale issue, not a literal issue of whether they have enough calories to make their legs move. If troops feel that the enemy has crossed their LOC behind them, they are much more reluctant to advance. And that is the sense of the tlan rule.

Another criticism is that the mandatory attack requirement of units in Zones of Control "doesn't really feel 'Napoleonic'." The Zone of Control subsystem is one of the oldest concepts in wargaming. And it's a useful concept. But when you stop and think about it, it doesn't represent anything that exists in reality. It is strictly a game mechanism, but it's necessary. You can't point out, on the Waterloo battlefield, when such and such a unit entered another unit's Zone of Control.

You'd have a difficult time making a case for these units having a Zone of Control in the sense that it is represented in wargaming. You could go to a much more tactical level, and start to talk about fields of fire, the presence of skirmishers, but Zones of Control were created simply to prevent three units on one side ganging-up on one unit in the enemy line.

There is a good justification for this in a general way. The units on either side of the defender are not going to stand idly by while the enemy in front of them does an oblique attack on the unit right next to them. They're going to get involved in some way, and the simplest way of showing this is to say that they have to be attacked.

You can design it any number of ways, but the Zone of Control happens to be a mechanism that works. The elan modifier that the French suffer when they are advancing to attack troops of Wellington's army was questioned. 'Why should the French be afraid of Dutch Belgian or Brunswick troops?'The answer is that the French don't necessarily know, just because they see some Dutch Belgian troops, that there aren't British troops and KGL troops and other veterans of the peninsula around, and they don't know who the leader of those troops is. They still have to be concerned about the Wellingtonian tactics that they learned to regard with trepidation from their experiences in Spain.

Mike Traynor - 12:50prn Jan 29, 2000 PST (#1918) The elan modifier when units of Wellington's army are attacked is to reflect a French reluctance to come to grips with Wellington's troops, because when the French had faced Wellington in the Peninsula, what they saw was often no what they got. Whether they saw Allies or Brits, the - 1 is there for the possible presence (and if you think only the British were to be feared, possibly British) of troops as yet unseen. In this situation it is irrelevant that the visible troops are not British; all that matters is they are of Wellington's army.

It does not seem weird to me that an army that is cut off from its LOC would be reluctant to commit to battle, which is what the demoralization effects get at. In this particular case, the Prussians would be committing to a second day of battle if Nappy had not been beaten on the 18th. Grouchy cutting the Prussian LOC on the 18th would not affect the Prussian army until the night of the 18th.

In the event, it did not matter, but might have. it does not seem that the Prussians were entirely without qualms about risking their LOC to go north instead of east after Ligny, especially since they might have been taking the risk for nothing, if Wellington had withdrawn too far or had withdrawn to the west to cover his own LOC. Napoleon's plan depended on Wellington and Blucher showing some sensitivity about their LOCs, and if I have to chose my expert on whether commanders were unconcerned with LOCs, I'll pick Napoleon.

Markus Stumptner - 02:52pm Jan 29, 2000 PST (#1919) It's well known that one of the reasons the French were cautious at Quatre Bras was because they were afraid to run into one of Wellington's traps. They didn't care that they were facing mostly D-Bs.

--From the web at http://talk.consimworld.com (Boardgaming, Napoleonics)

There follows a suggestion that the supply rules don't make sense since two French cavalry units can put the entire Prussian army out of supply. That's true if the Prussian player leaves the designated supply source hexes completely free and open, but it sounds like a player who hasn't actually read the rules before sitting down to play.

Frank Hakstege - 08:36am Jan 29, 2000 PST (#1912) If 2 French cavalry units can put the whole Prussian Army out of supply, that's not the system's fault but the player' fault. If the French, real life, would be able to do that they would have done that. In that case the Prussians would be demoralized (no food, no nothing coming through). The demoralized troops in LDGA can still march although with a -1 MP, can still force march, use road march and fight. The only thing they definitely can't do is advance after combat.

And why shouldn't the French be "afraid" of the Dutch-Belgians? I seem to remember that at Quatre-Bras some 8000 [Dutch-Belgian] troops delayed/stopped a French corps and cavalry corps for quite some time. I know that Chasse and his division were in the counterattack that drove off the imperial Guard. Were the 27th lagers really a crap unit? How come D-B militia at Gernioncourt stopped those invincible French? A lot of the D- Bs in the Waterloo campaign had fought the year before for Napoleon, there were even Elite Dutch Lancer units (Lancers Hollandais) and 20 or 30,000 Dutchmen fought during the 1812 Russia campaign for Napoleon.

The elan modifiers for morning, afternoon, friendly leader, or cavalry alone balance more than enough the negative modifiers (Wellington and forced march to engage). It pushes you into making attack in the morning and afternoon, forcing you a bit to follow history. As for the elan rules not being tested, I don't dare to say they were or were not. Kevin knows but I am pretty sure it was tested. LDGA is a fine game with beautiful components and good rules. Coming down hard on the game because of freak things happening (bad Prussian play) is not fair. And I agree with Kevin here, the game has been out for at least a year now and massive questions have never arisen. There is a difference between a basic flaw and one occurring from bad play and despite bad play the penalties are not as severe as to influence the game in a radical manner.

After Ligny, two French cavalry units did go to Gembloux and cut the Prussian LOC, and at least 10,000 Prussian troops that survived the battle of Ligny were lost for the duration of the campaign; they headed back toward base. As a result, the Prussian army on the 18th was extremely reluctant to attack. They waited until four o'clock on the battlefield of Waterloo before they engaged. The Prussian Army after Ligny was actually in some trouble. Their leadership, particularly Blucher kept them going.

Mike Traynor suggested a rules change whereby units whose elan rating is below the die roll result drop back, and the better troops continue the attack alone. I think that's a very fine suggestion and it certainly would work. It's not something that we chose to do. 'Why should having some bad units in your attack prevent good units from going in?' Our reasoning was 'the bad apple spoils the barrel,' and that if troops, no matter how good, see some of their friends and compatriots hesitating and falling back, it's going to have an effect on their morale; whereas, if those units had never been included in the attack, and there was no one around falling back, there would be no problem.

It's bad for the morale of even good troops when they see part of their formation falling back. At Waterloo, when the French saw the Guard falling back from their attack on the British Guards on the ridge-the whole army dissolved. So that is the rational for the rule, but I have no objection if people want to play Mike Traynor's suggestion.

One unsolved mystery of the elan rule, which we were aware of during development, was to find an alternative to actually having the units fall back to the hex they started from when they fail their elan. It would be nicer, at this scale of one mile per hex, for the units to be able to stay around and stand in contact with the enemy, without either side being required to attack; so that if you failed your elan rating, you wouldn't go back to the hex from which you entered that ZOC, but you would simply stop and do nothing. See the Q&A below for a new optional rule, 4.33 "Optional Discretionary Attack."

No doubt, we still have work to do on the tlan rules. With a new rule, if it is really something new, it takes time to perfect. Actually, to make it good takes a long time, perfection takes a while longer.