Let me just say I wanted to like NT, as I wanted to like BaM.

Let me just say that what is often referred to as "Randomness" by Euro players is in my sense a lack of detail. Realistically, in battle a lot of things can go wrong and very often do. What would football viewers do without dropped passes and fumbles and penalties? What is often an accusation of being “Random” is in essence those things that greatly effect a battle or a war that cannot be detailed directly into the system. Harold being shot by a “random” arrow causing the turn of the battle of Hastings is a good example. The happenstance of history is all around us. To ignore that at the expense of being elegant is a bit of pretense.

I have a theory that Eurogamers play the system, while Wargamers play tactics. Euros don’t want surprises. They want to understand a system down to its loopholes. They want simple rules or no rules at all. Both are correct in what they get out of the game. Good tactics will, always win a game even with poor rolls. And not all rolls are poor but they do even out the game.

Contrary to what many Euro players think, well designed wargames are never won or lost on bad rolls of the dice. And a good Eurogame is never entirely based on systematic design. Players who place them selves in awkward tactical situations where chance is the only the way they are going to win, would more than likely still lose in a game where there is little or no chance involved. Play ASL and you’ll understand what I’m saying.

The effects of artillery and cavalry are greatly abstracted in NT, in my opinion. Is this missing here? What about the weather? There is the fog at the battle site of Austerlitz that for some odd reason held on longer than it should have and greatly effected the disposition of the Allies waiting for the French troops hidden by the fog/mist. Is this like many things already abstracted by the designer into the game?

The other problem with the lack of randomness in a game will greatly reduce the detail in a game. Wargamers prefer detail, Euros prefer the broader strokes. The main problem with Euros is that for those players who beat the system, the game is over with. I’m afraid this is what happens to BaM and NT. There are little or no surprises in who wins the games, again and again and again. The system is played out. Who wants to play a game to lose. A Eurogamer often recounts how he challenged a newcomer and beat him. For the Wargamer its about learning and challenges and developing opponents. Nothing more excites me then being defeated (Patton wasn’t always right) in a game I was teaching somebody.

One of the concepts of BaM and NT is that a superior force will always beat an inferior force. This was not and still is not the case. Would Wellington’s center have held at Waterloo? What about Little Round Top at Gettysburg? The system simply will not work with all battles.

Then there’s the look of the game. Outstanding. And like Eurogames is there not a pretense to be prettier than smarter. For too long I have heard the nonsense over mapsheets and board games. Wooden pieces with no information and paper counters debate.

The game’s system main forte is maneuver and morale. In battles where there is quite a lot of maneuvering and wide open battle fields with no heavy defenses the system works (Marengo, Austerlitz, etc…), but in a battle like Borodino where French forces were forced to head on frontal assaults against entrenched forces with limited ability set-up and maneuver , the system probably would fail. It is quite easy for a player to compute the potential odds of the success down to the actual casualties of his attack without fighting. My wargame mind finds it very hard to grasp this logic.

The hidden unit factor works but only at the set-up to be honest. Strong attack in the center, strengthen the north with cavalry, etc … Those decisions alone decide the game, in my opinion. Everything else is a bit gamey, a word that Wargamers use derisively to describe Eurogames.

The dreaded Napoleon factor is absent in this game (a good thing … and one of the brilliant designs of the game), but then again so are the effects of the other corps commanders, who often risked their lives to create success. A unit led by a Corp commander is the same as one that is not? A bit obtuse there. But again it goes to being simple, but hinders on being simplistic.

Then there is the lack of solitaire play that was developed for BaM and worked somewhat well, but apparently is not offered for NT, which will greatly affect overall play here. Although a solitaire version can easily be wrought out of the system with some work. Replay value of a head-to head seems to be limited, as the players develop.

The terrain, like the effects of your troops, is pre-determined and means nothing to the player. The designer has taken all of that into effect. The designer has made you Napoleon but taken away all of your power. I think the game’s system is elegant. It has the look and feel of a wargame, but is it a wargame? Even the box looks like a wargame and it has Napoleon’s name on the box cover. The board is beautiful and for once someone leaves a little room for the two sides to maneuver their troops a bit. Avalanche’s recent Austerlitz game has the opponents starting nose to nose.

There’s a lot to like here, but then again there’s a lot missing. A bit of what some call randomness would have been good here. A solitaire version. It’s very tough to convince an old grognard to play this game. A bit more attention to detail (or the dreaded chrome) and a bit more control surrendered by the designer and put into the fates and hands of the players would have been nice. For a system that in my mind is quite different than any before it, it leaves me wanting more substance and less elegance.