And here's another game I didn't get on with

Command and Colours, this is going to be mild heresy, especially for many historical boardgamers; but I don't like it.

And I say this despite owning a copy (admittedly unplayed, as part of the Art of Tactic/CnC Samurai dual system set from Zvezda).

I've played, the Richard Borg engine to the game in several forms in the past, but clearly hadn't recalled details of the experience, so when Paul at the club suggested a game of CnC: Napoleonics, I was happy to give it a go.  So we set up the Battle of Corunna for an evenings' diversion.

Starting deployments

Which raises issue one, a minor aesthetic one that may not concern all I admit, but, as a board game on hex based terrain at a very large effective scale; it doesn't look much like the battlefield from what I can recall of it.  It doesn't look much like the battle.  It feels overly simplified even.

A legitimate complaint for any representation you say, and that might be fair, but personally I wouldn't try to refight a battle where I couldn't do a fair representation of the ground, and units at a key level of engagement.  For me that is Regimental as a minimum, Battalion preferred for Napoleonics (which means I'm doing the smaller battles mainly); in this game I couldn't readily say what things represented, but at a guess, each block would be a Battalion?  Without 100% recall, I wouldn't know anyway, but if smaller than that, companies say, there's no way this represented the whole battlefield....

Opening advances

The next issue for me is, here is a system that tries to shoehorn an awful lot into an unmodified dice roll.  Well, how it gets round that is by modifying the number of dice you roll, but given you will usually roll between two and five dice, and almost always only be removing dice from the pool, this gets punitive very quickly.  An infantry advance onto troops in cover quickly finds itself incapable of doing any harm.  But elites soon become disproportionately strong too, as adding a dice in combat of shooting is a huge advantage.  Then the British at least had some implausibly large units (Guards of 5, rifle companies of 3 bases) leading one to wonder whether this was the only way to reflect quality in game, or a laboured belief that paper unit sizes ever existed in the field....

I digress, perhaps.

French high-water mark

The dice themselves, you have a one in three chance of scoring an effect in infantry engagements, but only 1 in 6 of a kill; in short causing losses is hard, but equally rogue rolls of several hits at once feel terribly unfair.  But these are only comparatively minor gripes.

The Brits win mainly by staying still.

The main problem, and it's a biggie, a game breaker, is the card system.  I just, HATE it.  The battlefield is divided into two flanks and a centre, and you can only move units in those sectors when you draw the appropriate cards to play such an order.  Now there are a few for each sector, and a few that play across multiple areas, but never enough.

Oh but isn't that just replicating the fog of war you say; I like that, you say.  Well, if it worked I might agree, but it doesn't.  Having no control over the composition of the deck, you can't lean into simple tactics in preference over complex but deadly strategies - as one might in a deckbuilder - you are stuck with what you get.  Moreover, you really are stuck with what you are dealt.  You can't discard and replace a duff hand, in the hope of getting what you need, you must just play them out one card at a time and hope for better.  You will almost certainly go several turns where the perfect move presents itself, and you can't do it, because NONE OF YOUR F******G CARDS LET YOU!  It's not representing a battle where one of your subordinate commanders is poor, it represents an engagement where all of your commanders are recalcitrant halfwits.  It's like playing Black Powder by ignoring the Orders system and relying on the Blunder table instead.

It's bollocks.

Clearly the reader will have gathered two things from this.  That I didn't win, and that I don't like the game system.  So, yeah, maybe the two are connected, but personally I don't see why winning would've changed my mind.  In many cases my opponent won simply because I was unable to make the right attack at the right time, not because they struck me in any devastating way; you can't seriously feel you won a game in that circumstance can you?  The system makes punch and counter-punch virtually a lottery.

The third point however, is simply that the game was not fun, and finally, it didn't feel much like a historical simulation either.

Really not for me.

I'll stick to miniatures on this one.

...