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News from the North: Martin Wallace’s ‘Waterloo’’
What with all sorts of family business, school residential visits, daughters’ cricketing debuts etc. it’s been a while since Phil has hosted a session, but tonight there is a gap, so it’s a big hello to Roger, Charlie, the Duke of Wellington and the little Emperor.
Waterloo has been sitting unopened since Birmingham Expo, tucked in behind various Ragnar projects. Now, though, Phil sets to and attacks the rules booklet. Despite spending several hours on the Sunday afternoon running through various examples, he is still not certain he has ‘got’ it. Fortunately Charlie reveals that he actually has his own copy and has played it three times to date, and is confident of the rules. This turns out to be a very good thing. Roger, usually at the cutting edge of rules mastery, has drawn a blank – apparently it’s Phil’s fault for not letting him know what the game was going to be sooner.
To be fair to everyone, the rules aren’t the easiest beast to tame (acknowledged by Mr Wallace himself). They are long, have all sorts of cases and sub-cases but are rather clever.
Cleverness Number 1: In your turn you get between 2 and 5 actions, the exact number being known only by your opponent. Suddenly you have a mass of decisions to wrestle with. For instance, you can only ‘overstack’ during your turn, not at the end, so launching a quick massed assault becomes a gamble – do you have time to get enough troops into position? Do you risk an artillery bombardment first? And defensively, shunting up reserves becomes very tricky. You’re often fine getting them there, but do you have time to get them out of column into a defensive formation? Run out of time and you’re a sitting duck for any lurking cavalry.
Cleverness Number 2: Losses are measured in cubes. However, unlike other systems the cubes here are not ‘attached’ to a particular unit – they are owned by the group of units in that particular area. Move a unit out and take up to 5 cubes. When firing or checking morale, cubes are allocated as the player sees fit. Very neat and simple, very different and only occasionally slightly odd (e.g. a Dutch unit marches up to a battered British unit, takes its cubes off it and marches off with them leaving a nice fresh unit behind).
Cleverness number 3: The mismatch between artillery is portrayed nicely. The French guns begin the game paired in clumps, the British scattered in a long line with a -1 modifier to boot. The French also receive 6 grand battery shots, allowing double fire. As a consequence the French use periods of heavy bombardment of the allied line, the allies take occasional potshots but usually use the guns to support their infantry on defence.
Cleverness number 4: after cavalry win a combat they must check for staying under control; failure means they charge into any adjacent area (and on and on and on). The French aren’t too bad and only lose control on a 5 or 6, the British lose it on a 3, 4, 5 or 6 . . . . Add in some neat touches on changing formation, and the death ride of the Scots Greys becomes only too possible. Magnificent!
So how does it play? Like a dream. It really does give you the feel of Waterloo.
Charlie (as Napoleon) begins by storming La Haye Sainte, then almost captures Hougoumont, then almost breaks the British centre, hurls back a massed British counterattack before at last breaking through. Unfortunately, some very dodgy British chit drawing results in a large force of Prussians arriving early. Despite listening to Roger “my name is Blucher and I am mad” detail exactly what he will be doing in his turn, Charlie lets him do it: Roger overruns a pair of guns, loses control of his cavalry, scythes down an entire column of imperial guard (double victory points), and then in a series of further actions overruns two battered squares and slaughters an unsupported battery. He has one further action left. Phil suggests taking out an unsupported leader, but Roger has got the berserk fury on him. Charging his two tired cavalry units through a storm of artillery fire, another pair of batteries are added to the body count. The Prussians grind to a halt somewhere to the south of Hougoumont! and it’s only 2pm in the afternoon. Enough time for a block of French imperial guard to march to the outskirts of Mont St Jean and to almost pull off the ultimate last minute victory. Great stuff.
At three hours this is not a short game, and you need to harden yourself to the swings of outrageous fortune. Plaudits to Charlie for coping as well as he did – even when two blocks of wretched Dutch cavalry managed to break a square of imperial guard.
A cracker of a game.
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