I was so eager to play Waterloo that rather than wait for the slow boat to reach FFG, I paid the extra shipping to buy it from a store in England. I've now played it three times (the short scenario twice and the full scenario once) -- once with my wife (who loves eurogames but not wargames), once with a friend who is also a eurogamer, and once with a friend who (like me) is an experienced wargamer.

Although I'm a wargamer, lately most of my gaming has been eurogames. That's partially because of the opponents I have available, but mainly because of my own changing tastes. The elegance, clever mechanisms, beautiful components, and shorter playing time of the best eurogames have spoiled me for most wargames (though not all -- recent favorites have included Wilderness War and Hammer of the Scots). So the Phalanx promise of historically based games with many of the virtues (including great components) of eurogame is quite appealing to me. The one other game I know that falls in this niche is Battle Cry, which is a great favorite of mine (and the closest thing to a wargame my wife will play with me). However, it's perhaps too short a game to really sink your teeth into, and the scenarios all feel a bit generic, without much historical flavor.

So how does Waterloo stack up? It looks great, with a mounted map, thick counters, and beautiful artwork. The rules are fairly well written (though I did have a few minor questions, which were quickly answered in the forum on ConSimWorld), and the system is simple and innovative. The game is card-driven, but quite different from other card-driven games, including Battle Cry, since the cards are used not only to move the units but also in resolving combat (no dice). As the designer has pointed out, the heart of the game is card management. You never have enough cards to accomplish everything you want, and the trick is to get the most bang-for-the-buck with every card you play (and if you can bluff your opponent into wasting cards, all the better). The system makes for lots of tense decisions.

With historic unit designations and a map based on the historic battle field, the game provides a nice overall sense of history. The detailed combat mechanics, however, feel a bit weird. There is a great advantage to hitting your opponent in the flank or rear, and attacking a unit that can't retreat (often because its own units are in the way) is also advantageous. Since there are no ZOCs and units can be moved fairly far, this leads to units standing still while the enemy marches all the way around to attack from behind. Your opponent then does the same thing to your units, and a messy scrum can result that doesn't feel at all realistic. I suspect that as we get more experience we will find that optimal play involves less of such flanking marches and more emphasis on maintaining a solid line, but even so unit-to-unit combat doesn't feel much like Napoleonic warfare. But then, the game doesn't claim to be a simulation, and it works fine as a game.

Unfortunately, the game wasn't a hit with my wife. Interestingly, one area that gave her a lot of trouble was figuring out the movement cost for various maneuvers. As a wargamer they were second nature to me, but she never did get her mind around them. It didn't help that I had to keep reminding her that roads reduce the cost for entering a village or chateau, but not for a hill or crossing a ridge. The rest of us, however, quite enjoyed the game. The one full game I've played so far started at 9:00 pm and finished at 1:45 am (the "60 minutes" playing time on the box is nonsense), but until I looked at a clock when we finished I would have sworn it was only about midnight -- the game is that absorbing.

My one major gripe with the game is with some of the components. Note with their appearance or quality (it's hard to fault Phalanx there), but in their easy of use. The game provides beautiful counters to mark moved, disrupted, and rallied units. But because the markers are the same size as the units, once you've marked a unit the only way to find out its strength and facing is to pick up the marker and look. Of course, we're used to doing this in wargames, but it doesn't mean it's the best way. We ended up using little colored glass beads (the kind that are used as tokens in many collectible card games, and as "gems" in some eurogames) to mark units, and it was a great improvement, since you could still see the unit's strength and facing. It would have been nice if Phalanx had provided something similar -- smaller die-cut counters, little wooden cubes, or glass beads.

And the cards, although they look great, are also not particularly easy to use. There are three important pieces of information on each card -- a movement factor, a combat factor, and a special icon. Since these are put in the upper left corner, the upper right corner, and the bottom of each card, the only way to determine the full capabilities of each card is to look at the whole thing -- a real pain when you are juggling up to fifteen cards. The cards would be much easier to use if smaller version of the two number and the icon were listed one on top of the other in the upper left corner of each card (and upper right corner for lefties), so you could see them all when you spread your hand -- there is a reason traditional playing cards are designed as they are.

And the stand-up leader counters, although good looking, have a bad habit of obscuring the pieces and the board -- something smaller would have worked better.

None of these complaints are particularly significant, but I do hope that as Phalanx continues to publish games they take the opportunity to set new standards of usability as well as beauty for wargame components. In the meantime, Waterloo does a good job of filling the niche between lightly themed eurogames and realistic wargames.