The Road to Waterloo

The Scot's Greys in action

Despite the recent dabble in the waters of the Mississippi I am still looking to tackle the 1815 campaign with a combination of Columbia Games: Napoleon for the strategic dimension and my Hexon collection in the conjunction with the block armies for the tactical side. I shall be using Bob Cordery's Memoir of Battle rules (with the dubious benefit of my inevitable tinkering!) and in the meantime I have been organising the roster sheets and translating the units into their equivalent block formations. The basic concept behind this is that the forces and indeed the action itself, will be largely telescopic in that should I need to fight a brigade level action the blocks will be individual battalions and for divisional level game the individual units become, in effect, brigades. The beauty of Bob's rules is that such an approach is perfectly feasible but for me to exploit this versatility I need to have three levels of organisation.

The divisional level organisation is already in place as I will be using that supplied in the aforementioned board game. The game uses a step reduction system and each division typically will have a combat value of between 2 and 4. I am tempted to fight a game using the divisions with a block representing a point of the combat value by way of an experiment.

The roster sheet I am preparing at present is at battalion level and so after this I will need to look at the brigade level version. The divisional level organisation combat value will need to have both a brigade and battalion level equivalent so that casualties at the lower level can go towards the adjustment at a strategic level. This all sounds rather cryptic but once I have it all written down it will make a little more sense - at least I hope so!