Wargame review — C&C: Medieval

Forge Ahead

Designer: Richard Borg
Player count: 2
Publisher: GMT Games

When the Roman Empire reinvented itself in the east (a vast power known today as the Byzantine Empire), the 6^th century never looked so bright and promising. But Persia had other ideas, and the two forces would repeatedly meet on bloody battlefields for the better part of six decades.

C&C: Medieval is the latest incarnation of Richard Borg’s Commands & Colors system—a system the designer has molded and twisted to simulate a variety of conflicts, from the American Civil War to hypothetical skirmishes in the far reaches of intergalactic space.

Medieval stands as GMT’s third foray into the system, starting with Ancients back in 2006 and following up with Napoleonics in 2010. Both previous publications spawned large numbers of expansion modules, adding new battles to ponder and new factions with which to resolve them. There’s no reason to believe this new family member won’t be treated the same way—after all, the Middle Ages lasted a thousand years!

The basic system remains unchanged: stickered blocks represent various units, which are deployed on a grid of hexagons divided into three sections. Command cards allow players to activate a number of units in the left, center or right section (and sometimes across multiple sections). Movement follows; battle oftentimes ensues.

Each type of unit has its own movement and battle capabilities, perhaps allowing it to fire from a distance (as is the case for archers, amongst others) or engage the enemy with awesome power (like the heavy cavalry). Leaders provide support and enhance the performance of neighboring units; however, your commanders are not invincible, so make sure you guard them well.

Special six-siders are used to resolve combat, which sees players trying to roll the symbol associated with the unit type they are targeting. The more powerful the unit, the more dice it rolls in combat. But no matter its strengths or weaknesses, a unit is made up of exactly four blocks, and each hit suffered takes away one such block. Upon removal of a unit’s last block, the attacking player earns a banner. Accumulate the number of banners required by the historical scenario you’re playing, and you win the game.

HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO C&C: ANCIENTS?

Medieval is more or less an Ancients sequel. Leaders behave the same way, boosting units and preventing ill-timed retreats; units are back to consistently chucking the same number of dice, no matter how many blocks they have left. Yes, line combat is still a thing, and you’d do well to respect the doctrine.

In fact, the two games are so closely connected that the Medieval rulebook uses a special arrow icon to indicate where new or altered rules are introduced into the classic Ancients ruleset. (Although they missed one, the Parthian Shot, on page 16.)

• Superior Armor Class: In close combat, units with an armor class higher than that of their adversary can ignore one sword hit. (Red > Blue > Green)
• Superior Stature: In close combat, mounted units can ignore one sword hit inflicted by an infantry unit.
• Parthian Shot: Light bow cavalry units can shoot two dice at their attacker when they evade!

But the most significant, earthquake-inducing change introduced in Medieval is without a doubt the advent of Inspired Actions.

Each time you play a Leadership card (a card with the word “leadership” in its title), you can spend an Inspired Action token to activate one of your army’s Inspired Actions. Said actions vary from army to army but generally include powerful maneuvers such as Mounted Charge, Darken the Skies and Move Fire Move.

Essentially, the units activated by the Leadership card get to carry on whatever special action they are empowered with. (And if you don’t play an Inspired Action token with your leadership card, you earn one such token. Hoarders will have a field day.)

Inspired Action tokens can also be used to trigger Battlefield Actions, much like Inspired Actions, but without the need to play a specific card. Currently, three Battlefield Actions are available to both armies: Move a Leader (at the end of the turn), Battle Bonus (attack—or battle back!—with one additional die), and Bravery (ignore one flag).

Two things are important to state at this point, both of them red herrings.

First, the rules changes appear cosmetic; I mean, how much could a few lines of text really transform the gameplay experience? A lot more than one might think, it turns out.

Second, and given the previous statement, Medieval must feel significantly different from Ancients, right? Well, in a joyous paradox of cardboard and wood: not at all. If you’re a veteran of Ancients, you’ll feel right at home. And if you’re new to the whole shebang? Medieval is no more difficult to pick up than its predecessor.

(And I envy you the wondrous journey ahead.)

WAR PRODUCTION

Medieval ships in a deep box that harbors a tall deck of command cards, a large mounted board, all the Inspired Action tokens you might want, more terrain tiles than you can shake a long sword at, plus about a warhorse’s weight in wooden blocks and stickers.

The game also comes with printed dice whose solid, weighty plastic puts previous C&C stickered dice to shame. I love them and hope that GMT will keep using similar dice in the future.

Despite the fact that most cavalry units are pictured without a bow, several scenarios state that those units do, in fact, carry bows. No worries: bow tokens have been provided to help mark those units quickly and efficiently. (The marker also looks pretty cool, sitting atop that quartet of blocks on the battlefield.)

The Medieval board is one hex deeper than most of the other C&C boards, which might not seem like much of an alteration. Ah, but you can certainly feel the difference when your raiding cavalry units, operating deep into enemy territory, try to make their way home.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Only 18 pages of rules stand between you and victory on the battlefield.

And those pages are slightly better organized than the Ancients rulebook, with concepts like “Attach and Detach Leaders” being given their own section instead of ending up buried in a wall of text about movement. So get to it—you’ll be up and running in no time.

As usual within this family of games, the separate player aids contain all of the stats pertaining to individual unit types, so that you’ll never have to browse the rulebook for those in the heat of battle. But I do miss the terrain effects player aids that accompanied many of my other forays into the C&C world. Hopefully, GMT will equip us crusaders with those weapons in an expansion to come.

The back of the rulebook reveals a full card almanac (quite handy when it comes to assessing a few edge cases), as well as 19 challenging scenarios. Just like in Ancients, the Medieval battles start you off easy, without any terrain in sight. But just you wait. Can you hear the raging waters of the Euphrates in the distance? Or the furious wind barreling through the many passes of Petra Mountain?

Terrain will find you. What you accomplish with it is up to you.

FUN FACTOR

One of the nice surprises here is that the game supplies armies on both sides with light bow infantry units that can shoot adversaries at a distance of four hexes. That’s a range of more than a third of the board, which can wreak some serious havoc in your opponent’s line. Long-distance relationships have suddenly become a lot more tense.

I was a bit disappointed when I saw only one deck of cards sitting in the Medieval box. I had become accustomed to (spoiled by?) the tactician deck found in Napoleonics and some other games in the series. But when I started playing with the Inspired Action tokens, I quickly realized I didn’t want to go back.

Whenever you play a Leadership card, you can spend a token to morph that card into whatever Inspired Action you need. True, tactician cards meant you always had a handful of such actions at your disposal, but you might get stuck with stuff you didn’t need and wait an entire game for the one card you want to show up. With Inspired Action tokens, when you do draw that Leadership card, you can call it whatever you like.

Inspired indeed.

I would be remiss if I didn’t make a special mention of the cataphract cavalry. Not only can those super heavy cavalry units trample everything in their path with their 4-dice attacks, but their armor class is at the very top of the food chain, allowing them to ignore a sword hit from almost everyone, even other heavy units. With a leader at its head, the cataphract cavalry cannot be ignored for long. Flanked by a handful of friendly units, it becomes a veritable terror on the board.

PARTING SHOTS

Back in 2011, I wrote in a review [link] that Napoleonics was my favorite entry into the world of Commands & Colors. I loved the fact that units attacked with only as many dice as they had blocks left; that artillery could shoot over the heads of friendly units and join forces with infantry or cavalry in some impressive feats of combined arms; that infantry could go into a square formation and stand its ground against the most aggressive cavalry charge. I loved it all. And that sentiment went unchallenged for years… until I started missing Ancients.

Napoleonics remains a fascinating game, but there is a simplicity, a directness to Ancients that frees the mind to tackle the tactical problems that are the beating heart of the system. After over 150 plays of Ancients I felt ready for the next step, but Napoleonics might have gone just a tad too far in its sophistication—despite the fact that I couldn’t imagine myself ever again playing a C&C game without a tactician deck. So for a dedicated Ancients player, Medieval feels like a better “next step.” And it gives us the Inspired Actions mechanism, which I believe represents a fascinating evolution of the tactician deck of cards.

In the end, I’m getting the best of both worlds.

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Expansion review — C&C: Napoleonics - General, Marshals, Tacticians

It's a New Day on the Battlefield

(Originally published on December 23, 2015)

Designer: Richard Borg

Player count: 2

Publisher: GMT Games

It’s always when you think your world is fine and stable that something comes along to rock the boat. So there I was, happily breezing through scenario after scenario of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics, and GMT decides to throw a monkey in the wrench. Not just another expansion with additional blocks and a generous helping of new battles, but something more akin to a revolution.

So the boat rocks and rocks and—to my surprise—comes out the other side a better, even more fascinating vessel.

Expansion #5: Generals, Marshals & Tacticians has arrived.

The thing is, it comes in a standard C&C expansion box, so the deception works like a charm. You expect a chopped up tree in a shiny new color, stickers depicting foreign, exotic new units, and orders of battle galore.

Well—surprise!

NEW UNITS

Sure, you get new units. But just a few, and they are sprinkled over the whole system.

So there is a handful of French blocks, notably a brand new Guard Horse Artillery unit—essentially a Horse Artillery that can ignore two flags. The British get a chunk of additional Light Cavalry and Line Infantry units (you always need more canon fodder), but the shiny new toy for Britain is the Rocket Battery—the portable mortar of the era. It doesn’t need line of sight to fire, attacks with two dice, but requires two icons of the target unit to inflict a hit. The good news? Rocket Battery flags cannot be ignored. The bad news? The thingamabob can explode in your face: if you roll two saber icons, the Rocket Battery itself takes a hit!

The Portuguese get one more Light Infantry unit and one more Line Infantry Unit—plus an additional Leader—while the Prussians receive a single Cuirassier Heavy Cavalry unit to add to their forces. Last but not least, the Russians benefit from the most new toys: in addition to some backups for already existing units, the green guys can now field a Light Lancer cavalry unit and two Militia Lancer cavalry units, both of which can reroll flags when they attack (even with First Strike). But the Militia, of course, needs to retreat three hexes per flag rolled against it. Ah, the bane of the unwashed, untrained masses. 

NEW RULES

There are very few of those. Garrison Markers now make it possible to leave a single block behind when an infantry unit leaves a city hex. The little guy will give it his all, and won’t count as a victory banner when he finally bites the dust. Then there’s the Grand Battery rule, which allows two or more adjacent artillery units to fire together in one devastating blast. Oh, and lone leaders can now be attacked at long range.

But the real beast hidden in the booklet is the couple of pages that detail the workings of the two new decks. Not one—two.

Okay, so the first one is a revised Command Deck. Now standing at 90 cards, it towers over the original 70-card Command Deck. For the most part it’s the same deck, except for the new Take Command cards, virtually identical to the Inspired Leadership cards in C&C Ancients: order a leader and up to three adjacent, linked units.

Some of the other cards now sport three stars (put there for upcoming La Grande Bataille scenarios), while others have a brand new sentence in bold at the very bottom: Draw 1 Tactician card at the end of the turn.

And here’s where the second deck comes into play, with 50 cards that seriously alter the face of C&C: Napoleonics.

So what are they? Each Tactician card basically allows you to break a rule. First Strike, for instance, has been moved to the Tactician Deck (where it thrives alongside a few variations on the same theme); Short Supply is another card that’s been relocated to the Tactician Deck. The rest of the cards offer new capabilities, such as Hold the Line Leader, which allows an attacked unit adjacent or attached to a leader to ignore all flags, or Superb Infantry Training, with which a moving infantry unit conduct ranged combat at full force. Some of my favorites include Artillery Reposition (move an artillery unit 3 hexes, or move it 2 hexes after it battles), Charge if Charged (if a cavalry unit attacks another cavalry in melee, both units roll their dice at the same time), and Call Forward Reserves (which is really a reversed Short Supply: take a friendly unit from your baseline and move it to any hex occupied by or adjacent to a friendly leader within the same battlefield section).

Players start each battle with an opening hand of Tactician cards, typically between two and five. On your turn, you play a Command Card as always, but you can supplement it with a Tactician card—each Tactician card specifies when it can be played, and how.

But be careful! Those are only replenished with the play of a Command Card that states so. Use them wisely.

FUN FACTOR

The rulebook clocks in at 28 pages, but that’s mostly scenarios and reference material. The actual rules for all that new, good stuff take up all but two pages. TWO PAGES.

That’s an incredibly light overhead for a module that operates such profound changes. (My wife was apprehensive when I took out the new card decks, and I could see she was bracing herself for the rules onslaught she was sure was coming—only to ask “Is that it?” after just two minutes of explanations.)

All in all, there’s practically nothing new to learn: the cards do all the work. This allows players to get into the swing of things almost immediately.

And what a swing it is! I feared the new Tactician cards might detract too much from my beloved C&C: Napoleonics, but after a single engagement, I couldn’t imagine playing the game without them. They enhance the role of leaders on the battlefield, provide a thrilling tactical flexibility, and keep things fresh, battle after battle.

The Tactician cards also provide a sense of your commander’s capabilities. It’s all good and well to read that Napoleon was in charge of a particular battle, but you don’t quite feel it until you start the game with six Tactician cards whereas your opponent gets only three (poor Blücher).

PARTING SHOTS

Some might consider a 90-card Command Deck to be too swingy and random, so GMT provides a deck list that pares the whole thing down to 75 cards. (My recommendation? Play with the tall stack and don’t look back.)

There’s also the concern that you might get stuck with a Tactician card that, for instance, enhances cavalry action when you have no cavalry on the board. Take heart: you can always use a Tactician card to move one of your leaders up to three hexes at the end of your turn. (Which, in turn, helps alleviate the occasional “no card for the correct battlefield section” problem.)

Frankly, I’m loving this. Nothing quite like receiving your initial hand of Command Cards and thinking, “Okay, nice, now let’s see what the Tactician Deck gives me.”

And grinning from ear to ear.

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Wargame review — C&C: Napoleonics

La Grande Armée

(Originally published on January 11, 2011)

Designer: Richard Borg

Player count: 2

Publisher: GMT Games

It’s early in the 19^th century, and that short French guy thinks he owns the whole of Europe. Let’s call on our British and Portuguese friends to teach that arrogant, blue-clad “Emperor” a lesson…

C&C: Napoleonics is the fifth incarnation of Richard Borg’s Commands & Colors system, which got its start when Battle Cry—on the American Civil War—was first published by Avalon Hill back in 2000.

(And as such, Napoleonics marks the tenth anniversary of the system. Hurray!)

Days of Wonder published the WWII version Memoir ’44 in 2004, followed in 2006 by two more games: the medieval-fantasy BattleLore (published by Days of Wonder and eventually passed on to Fantasy Flight Games) and Commands & Colors: Ancients (published by GMT Games), featuring the myriad battles of antiquity.

This time around, the British, the Portuguese and the French are thrown pell-mell onto the battlefield, circa 1808.

(True, Fantasy Flight Games also published, in 2010, a “BattleLore game” called Battles of Westeros, roughly based on the C&C system. While most people consider Westeros a member of the family, I think it features rules changes too significant for the game to truly belong with the rest of the series; otherwise, Worthington Games’ Hold the Line and Napoleon’s War might as well be called C&C games.

So there.)

Now newcomers to the Commands & Colors fun might wonder: are all those titles the same game? Well, yes… and no. They are all based on the same fundamental rules, but each incarnation offers its own unique twists and turns, in addition to exploring completely different themes.

So let’s take a look at those fundamentals, exploring further into the idiosyncrasies of Napoleonics itself—without sidestepping the unavoidable comparison to its older brother, Ancients, with relevant comments between brackets.

The board is composed of blank hexagons arranged into a rectangular grid. In turn, that grid is divided into three sections, giving each player a center, a right flank and a left flank. Onto that grid are placed hexagonal cardboard tiles sporting different terrain types, which makes it possible to recreate the many scenarios provided with the game. Units—represented here by wooden blocks adorned with illustrated stickers—are deployed onto that battlefield in a variety of types and numbers.

And the game begins.

Each player holds a hand of cards, most of which—called Section Cards—allow a certain number of units to act within a particular section. (For instance, an Attack Right Flank card allows you to order three units on your right flank.) An ordered unit can move and/or fire, depending on the capabilities of each particular unit.

The rest of the cards are Tactic Cards and grant the player wielding them special actions. Leadership, for instance, orders all of the active player’s leaders, no matter where they are on the board.

Combat is resolved with special six-sided dice sporting icons instead of numbers. Essentially, whenever a unit attacks, it rolls however many dice are called for by that unit’s type and applies any hits to its target. So you’re firing on an infantry unit? Try to roll infantry symbols. Same goes with cavalry and artillery. The crossed-swords symbol? It’s a hit on anything—provided you were attacking at close range and not firing from afar.

Each hit removes one block from the targeted unit, which will eventually lead to that unit’s destruction. When a unit gets wiped out, the opponent earns a victory banner. Whoever reaches a specific number of victory banners first—as specified by the special instructions of each scenario—wins the game.

And all of that in less than 60 minutes. Not bad at all.

But that’s it for the basics: Napoleonics pushes a cartful of fresh concepts to the front line. The main ones are examined below.

Leaders play an important role on the battlefield, just as they did in Ancients. [Although that role is now limited to ordering and support; leaders don’t provide an attack bonus the way they did in Ancients.] Keep them away from the front line, but not so far back that they won’t have a chance to influence the troops. Just make sure you keep them safe!

In all previous incarnations of the system, the number of remaining blocks in a unit was not factored into the strength of said unit’s attack. But now it is. The basic attack strength of a unit is equal to the number of its blocks. [This makes the “last ditch effort” a much more difficult decision to make, as you’re sacrificing a busted unit—most of the time giving away a victory banner to your opponent—for at best a terribly weak attack.]

Units that are attacked in melee but neither eliminated, nor forced to retreat, can battle back. So consider your attacks carefully, for if you don’t destroy the enemy, he might very well do it to you. [Ancients players are familiar with that concept. But here, with attacked units battling back at reduced strength, snappy comebacks are less reliable than they used to be.]

Each Napoleonics die features not one, but two infantry symbols. This makes infantry a prime target in any scenario. [And represents a definite step up from the level of aggressiveness Ancients veterans are used to.]

Cavalry faced with a melee (from an adjacent hex) attack from an infantry unit can Retire and Reform, pulling back two hexes and suffering hits only on Cavalry results and not crossed swords. [This is very similar to the Evade move in Ancients, except that here, only the Cavalry is afforded that luxury. All other units stand fast!]

Infantry can form square when attacked by cavalry, which means the cavalry only rolls one die for its attack—if it doesn’t bounce off the square first, that is. An infantry in square removes one card at random from its owner’s hand and puts it aside, to be retrieved only when the infantry is ordered to come out of square.

Not only can artillery standing on a hill now fire over a friendly, adjacent unit, but it can join infantry or cavalry in a combined arms attack, adding up the dice each unit would roll in separate attacks.

And one more little detail if I may: cavalry cannot use ranged combat. At all. For those equine warriors, it’s melee or bust!

There are more wrinkles to the game, of course, but painting with a wide brush, this is it.

WAR PRODUCTION

Everything looks really good, as is customary with most GMT games.

I especially enjoy the cards, printed on good stock, and with a gorgeous layout and a most delicious—yet simple—back. I always thought that the Ancients cards, while serviceable, were a bit bland, washed-out. This is not the case here.

The board is mounted from the get-go, which wasn’t the case back in the early days of Ancients. (“You kids have it easy nowadays!”) So, naturally, veterans of the system will want to know: does the board have a reverse side printed with a bleeding hexagonal pattern so that two boards, when put side by side, will create a unified battlefield and eventually allow for an Epic version of Napoleonics? Sadly, no.

But the story doesn’t end here... When prodded, GMT Producer Tony Curtis alluded to two upcoming Epic maps, which would be double-sided. How’s that? No amount of bribery and/or blackmail could make the man spill more of the beans, however.

The oft maligned dice I found to be perfectly fine. Sure, they’re blank indented dice waiting for you to apply a sticker to each face. But you’re already stickering a million blocks—what’s the problem with taking care of a few dice while you’re at it?

However, I would like the dice stickers to be a little bit smaller so that they would fit perfectly inside each indentation. And I really don’t like passing dice around all the time in the heat of battle; I’m convinced I’m not the only one who would have been happy to cough up a few dollars more for a second set of dice.

But GMT is listening, and players can buy additional dice and stickers directly from them. And there’s one more option for the sophisticated gamer: Valley Games has been granted permission to produce wooden dice for Napoleonics the way they did for Ancients.

I love how the GMT folks have decided to print a scenario book apart from the rulebook this time around. It makes both documents much easier to handle, and will not only enable players to look up a rule without losing sight of the current scenario instructions, but also make it possible for GMT to update the rulebook while leaving the scenarios alone (and vice-versa).

The blocks are standard GMT wooden blocks, but the stickers are different from their Ancients counterparts. Whereas units used to sport a colored symbol to indicate what categories they belonged to, each sticker now has a colored band at the bottom. Red stands for artillery, yellow for cavalry, and blue for infantry. Furthermore, each band holds the unit’s exact type, such as Grenadier, Guard Heavy, Horse, and so on.

So no more confusion, and no more looking up what the green circle with a white outline stands for.

The tiles are a bit on the thin side—especially next to the massive mounted board!—but do a very nice job of bringing to life the terrain of each particular battle. The tile cardboard is the same thickness as the one found in Ancients.

The box is one of the heavy duty ones GMT has always uses to ship out their Ancients stuff. Sturdy enough to hold all the heavy components and take a beating. Plus the cover is stunning—enough to hold your gaze from the shelf and make you want to play the blasted thing. 

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

I found the rules to be clear and well organized. Better organized, in fact, than in Ancients,  where I regularly had problems finding what I was looking for.

Napoleonics is not a complicated game, but with a rulebook clocking in at 23 pages, it’s still a bigger bite than casual gamers can chew. Coming to it cold (or even from Memoir ’44), the learning curve is a bit steep, in large part because of the impressive number of different units.

For Ancients aficionados, even, the learning curve is not completely ironed out, since many of the system’s main mechanics are retooled significantly. Yet, many others are left untouched, which is why I was expecting a page (or just a sidebar) featuring just the changes. Fans of Ancients would have been told to read only this and that section—in a manner similar to what was done in GMT’s Combat Commander sequel, Pacific—thus speeding up the conversion process. The rules do begin with a column of Napoleonics highlights that point to a few of the main features of the new game, but expect an entire read-through of the rules to make sure you don’t forget any detail.

Once you’re done, however, you will hardly ever need to go back to the rules, for the player aid cards are as detailed as one could hope for. Those were formatted differently from their C&C Ancients counterparts, so old hands will feel at first that they need to have their glasses adjusted. (Fear not, the feeling will quickly pass.) GMT provides two copies of each player aid, so that both opponents can peruse each nation’s little battlefield idiosyncrasies to their hearts’ content.

And there’s now a player aid card (again in two copies) for the various terrain types! Gone the need to constantly ransack the rulebook for the special effects of a forest tile on movement. And good riddance, I say.

FUN FACTOR

For newcomers to the system, this is a relatively simple tactical wargame that can be learned with no real hurdles and played out in an hour. For seasoned players, this package is much more than an expansion for Ancients. It’s more refined, more subtle… and also more brutal. What’s not to like?

I especially enjoy that identical units across two nations turn out not to be identical at all. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and it often makes for interesting tactical decisions of a sort that rarely arose in a game of Ancients.

Terrain effects are more intricate and require more subtlety to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of them. Interestingly, whereas terrain in Ancients usually imposed limits on the number of dice that could be rolled in battle, here terrain harks back to Memoir ’44 by subtracting dice from an attack.

Just as in Ancients, attacked units that survive the skirmish can fight back. But here, the retort will be carried out with a reduced number of blocks, and thus an equally dwindling number of attack dice. Which makes combined arms attacks so devastating, in that they are more likely to wipe out the opposing unit before it gets any chance to battle back.

Many of the cards contained herein are repeats of concepts present in every incarnation of the C&C system, such as First Strike or Counterattack—indeed basic cards that are necessary for the game’s engine to be able to run at all. But some cards are completely new! Cards like Leadership, that orders every leader on the board (with any attached unit), La Grande Manoeuvre, which lets you move up to four units up to four hexes (but not battle), or—one of my favorites—Short Supply: one unit (yours or your opponent’s) goes back to any baseline hex in its section. Nasty—or a real life saver, depending on which side you’re sitting.

Even “old” cards deserve a new appraisal in the Napoleonics context. First Strike, for instance, is not as obvious to use now, what with the battle dice linked to the number of blocks in the unit. If your tendency, like me, was to play First Strike to grant a dying unit one last heroic bash against an oncoming juggernaut… well, we pretty much have to kick that old habit now.

The game comes with 15 scenarios, and my first reaction was tainted with disappointment. Only FIFTEEN? Not even 20? But the truth is that we’ve all been spoiled by the many Ancients expansions that routinely lured us in with more than 20 scenarios in a single box. Turns out the base game of Ancients featured just 10 scenarios.

That makes Napoleonics at least 1.5 times better. Right?

PARTING SHOTS

C&C: Napoleonics is arguably the most complex game in the series. But it is also the most refined member of the family, giving you substantially more to think about as your units engage the opponent. It’s a thrilling ride that, while offering more options than its predecessors, still manages to completely run its course in an hour or so.

The game scratches several itches that were almost scratched before, but not quite. It has become without a doubt my favorite game in the series.

For instance, in Ancients, I never liked how beat up units, often down to a single block, would regularly be sent on suicide missions, welcoming annihilation in exchange for one last shot at a particular opposing unit (often with an attached leader), rather than trying to save its own skin—and deny a victory banner to the opponent. But now? A unit down to its last block usually attacks with just one die. This results in a much higher rate in troop rotation, bringing fresh units to the front and carrying the wounded to the back. I didn’t see that often enough in Ancients. No more!

GMT is already preparing a first expansion—bringing Spaniards into the fray—for a projected August 2011 release date. Yep, that’s in a scant six months.

I’m happy.

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