In Praise of Joy and Forgetfulness….

An oldie but definitely a goodie!

In many ways I have that well known Bon vivant, wit and raconteur Conrad Kinch of Joy and Forgetfulness fame to thank for the inspiration for this post and so it is in his honour this is dedicated to.

It is June once again, and so inevitably the looming spectre of the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo taps me on the shoulder and reminds me of games and Napoleonic projects of years gone by. I have mentioned ad nauseam of my fondness and long term interest in the 1815 campaign, beginning with my first painted army of Airfix figures and Bruce Quarrie’s rules - the orange Airfix magazine guide version - and followed by a 15mm collection and a set of rules called Le Petit Empereur and more recently the 28mm Del Prado collection. All of these have sadly gone and so my Napoleonic adventures are now limited to boardgames. I flirted with the Command and Colours system but for a variety of reasons it never really pressed all the buttons for me. There is however, one game that most emphatically does - Napoleon by Columbia Games.

The map “Charleroi. By God that man does war Honour!”

The game itself was originally produced by Jedko in the early 1970s and was then picked up by Avalon Hill. From them it went to Columbia Games and was launched in the early 1990s as a 3rd edition. Subsequently to that a 4th edition appeared and currently a 5th edition is under development. 

The game uses blocks for the units and as is customary with Columbia games, the blocks are set up so that your opponent can only see the back and not the side with the current strength or indeed, the types of unit itself, infantry, cavalry or artillery. The units use step reduction to record combat losses and this is shown by rotating the block so that the correct strength point is at the top of the unit. Strengths range from 4 to 2 steps, depending on the formation type. Movement is on a point to point basis - the points being villages - and if both sides descend on the same village the units involved are deployed on a battle board for the tactical phase. I have played this many times and it is a wonderful game with the fog of war and with both sides operating under asymmetric pressure - the French needing to get to Brussels whilst keeping the allies apart, the allies needing to join together to defeat the Corsican ogre.

The tactical battle board

I owned the 3rd edition but disposed of it when the 4th came out. This was a mistake as far as I was concerned as the 4th edition reduced the units in the game by merging some formations so as not to crowd the map. I could never get as enthusiastic with the 4th edition and so when the chance can me up to get a copy of the 3rd I leapt at it! 

The respective orders of battle featuring unit strength points. Note that the units are nominally divisional sized.

Some years ago, before the Portable Napoleonic Wargame came out, I had it in mind to refight the battle using the block armies and based on the order of battle used in the 3rd edition. I drew up the order of battle and recorded the number of hit boxes per division sized unit based on the strength points from the game. The idea was to use the game as the scenario generator and then fight the resulting battles using my block armies on the tabletop. It was with this in mind I commissioned Warbases to make some movement trays for the block armies.

As an aside I fought the battle itself using the long departed Del Prado collection and a square grid based version of Waterloo A La Carte! The original version used an 8 hex by 6 grid whilst my squared version used a chessboard. It was huge fun despite being rather cramped as the figures were a little on the large size for a 60mm square.

Thanks to the reminder about Waterloo from the esteemed Mr Kinch, I have added the whole Waterloo with blocks project back into the pile of things to do at some point. Certainly using the block armies with movement trays (these will have the appropriate formation names on them for identification purposes) and 3D terrain will certainly look rather splendid in a Kriegspiel kind of way.

Yes I know there are far better books on the subject than these venerable stalwarts, but to a callow youth of twelve years old they were the gateway into a lifelong hobby. I would never part with either!

It also means that I will have to watch Waterloo again, as well as rereading a couple of my favourite books on the subject. How we suffer for our hobby eh?

The Waterloo campaign has given me much joy over the years - admittedly probably longer ago than I would like - and so it would be easy to overlook or even forget the fun to be had attempting to outdo Napoleon or Wellington. One thing is certain though, I am grateful to Mr Kinch for putting me back in touch with roots so to speak.

He really is a super fellow.