C&C Napoleonics enflé

Wargaming returned to the annexe last night with a game of Command & Colours Napoleonics enlarged somewhat beyond its normal parameters. That it all worked reasonably well is a testament to the robustness of the original design rather than anything I did. Anyone who's been to business school will be familiar with Mintzberg's concepts of emergent as opposed to deliberate strategy. In wargaming terms I lean to the former, to what Lindblom described as a fragmented process of serial and incremental decisions and what Mintzberg himself defined as the allocation of resources before the explicit espousal of the objective.

And thus has been the journey from small units simply designed as a painting exercise through the acquisition of rules and terrain; it's been a series of opportunistic and ad hoc undertakings. The current such small step is to play C&C Napoleonics on my full table, in terms of hexes that's about four times the size of the playing area for which the rules are intended. We had previously played on wider setups, but this was the first time we would play on one that was deeper as well. I took one of the scenarios from the latest expansion and made most terrain features four times bigger While that felt OK for woods and hills it didn't for towns and so those were fudged somewhat to retain shape and position without each being too large. I doubled the forces, partly with the intention of making more space for manoeuvre, and partly because I started to run out at that point. I left the number of officers the same, on an intuition that doubling them would be too many. The issue which seemed likely to cause most problems was that of movement distances, with units potentially taking too long to come into action and into contact. Here, after much thought, I did nothing at all; often the best option when one doesn't know what's best.

And, as I say, it all worked reasonably well and I came out of it with a number of learning points:

• It's probably time to say goodbye to the official scenarios. They are not balanced and nor are they meant to be. The intention is that they are played twice with sides swapped, which is clearly not what we're looking for.
• The ratio of officers to units needs to be higher than the 1:8 or so that we played last night - maybe 1:6. And rather than specific officers for specific commands - which is how we play Piquet for example - I prefer to see the officer figure as being analogous to another Piquet concept. In that game firing (as in rolling the dice and calculating casualties) represents the peak of an activity that is in reality occurring all the time. In C&C (or in my mental model of it at least) the presence of a model of a divisional commander represents a peak level of officering, as compared to the normal level which is going on in the background all the time. It therefore makes sense that the player can switch the models about between different groups of units.
• The Tactician cards in the new(ish) fifth expansion add to the gameplay, and - given that it is a game - that's a good thing. In particular they give a potential outlet when one's Command cards aren't helping, and there's always the tantalising prospect of being able to string a series of cards together to dramatically change the way things are going.
• A point that applies to all games under every set of rules: don't start the forces too far apart. One knock-on implication for jumbo C&C is how to define the 'baseline' hex whenever these are referred to on cards. We played two rows last night, but I think that needs to be increased to three.
• The movement rules possibly don't need adjusting at all. Firstly various new Command cards plus a number of the Tactician cards add quite a bit of movement capability. And then there's the question of style of play. I think that even more than in the original game, one must churn cards that one doesn't need and build a hand for the current specific phase of one's overall plan.

We got perhaps half way through the scenario - the morning of Liebertwolwitz 14th October 1813 - in the evening and the Allies appear to have decided on defence, having come off worse in the early cavalry exchanges and been on the wrong end of what appeared to me to be an optimistic French infantry attack on their left. I'm not sure if we'll finish it; I suspect too much time may pass before we get back together and then we'll need to get James' game for Derby ready. In any event I think my ultimate aim - my deliberate strategy if you will - would be to set these larger C&C Napoleonic games up so they can be completed in an evening.