From: John Best Subject: Re: Opinions: GDW's Eylau John Krantz asked for an opinion of the GDW boxed game, "Eylau: Napoleon's Winter Battle, 1807.": >Just for the heck of it, I decided to pull out this game to give it a quick >playthrough. Has anyone played this GDW boxed game before? I'm interested >in any opinions of it. I've also noted the game has some rules that were a >bit awkwardly written (cavalry retreat before combat). I also see that >since artillery bombardment attacks are odds-driven, the larger/denser >units you fire at, the _smaller_ the likelihood that you can impact the >units (...odd!). This was a problem in NES' Dresden game as well which I >believe had a fix provided by the Canadian Wargamers Journal. > Ok, well, just to get the ball rolling: Published: 1980 Designer: Rik Fontana (I recall seeing his name on some other GDW stuff too, but, as is the case with many of the operatives of the period, I don't think he's still in the hobby.) It's a straight GDW product (Frank Chadwick, John Astell, Paul Banner). I don't think any current consimmers were involved in its production--no names I recognize anyway. Components: It looks like your standard GDW sheet of 240 counters. Your French are...blue. Your Russians are....green. Your Prussians are anachronistically gray. If you've seen any GDW map from the 75-80 period, you know what you're going to see when you lay eyes on this. The usual passel of GDW cardstock charts and tables. It's still a decent looking package, even by today's standards. Scale: 1 hex = 150 yards, turn length = .5 hour, counters are mostly regiments (a somewhat unusual choice for the depiction of a French army of this period--there aren't that many games where the French are shown at the regt. level--compared to the s-load where they are shown at batt level, brigade level, or div. level). I found this scale inviting. My play: My notes are just over 14 years old, dating from 2/22/83. Positionally, my Russians hadn't done that badly, but they were really chewed up in terms of casualties. Anyway, the victory point differential indicates a substantial French victory. At the subjective level: This was a game that I wanted to like a lot, but actually I like it only a little. I was looking for a slightly upgunned version of the N@W system (at least at that point in my life I was), and I wanted a lower level (ie below div. level) depiction of the units. On the face of it, this is basically what Eylau is. Oh, there are a few twists (John K alluded to a few of them), but basically this is not really a tactical treatment of the battle. There are no formation rules, no facing rules; there are ZOCs. So, while this was what I wanted in some sense, I also found that I still needed a little more complexity. In terms of balance, the actual battle was Nap's first real check on the battlefield. I tend to be a Francophile in Nap. games, so you really can't judge the outcome of the game by the outcome I reported above. The actual Russians of course were hamstrung by their rudimentary 3CI (at least in comparison to the French, who clearly knew their business from top to bottom). The game tries to model this difference in terms of leaders who have command radii of various length--all you guys know this routine. Surprise, surprise, the Russian leaders have shorter radii on the average. My sense is that, if I were less of a Francophile, the GDW Russians could do a lot better than the historical Russians who basically took a position and hung on. A sidebar or two: You probably noted the structural similarity with the Gamers' Napoleonic series, and an experiment that awaits someone (not me) is to make up some numbers for the Leaders, borrow some skirmisher counters from the Gamers' Austerlitz, and just run the whole game as NBS game. Second sidebar: When I got the game out of the closet to write these comments, I noted that, for one of my playings I generated some primitive computer graphics showing the regimental evolutions that the French and Russians used during the period, and made up, jeez, over a hundred markers of various sorts. I think I was seeking that most elusive of all grails (for me): a Napoleonic game with enough detail to show tactical niceties, maintain good historical accuracy with regard to frontage and depth, and still move along in a speedy fashion. But I've never hit it yet. One more sidebar: I'm certainly sympathetic with John K's point about the strangeness inherent in odds/ratio bombardment CRTs, at least at this scale. Still, the other side of the coin is that it's a theoretical issue. That is, it's not the density of the soldiers that's causing the casulties; it's the number of guns that are firing on them relative to their density. On that score, the CRT in the Eylau game behaves perfectly normally. If you can find enough guns to get a high odds attack on a dense hex, you may cause proportionally more casualties than you would cause with fewer guns on a less densely packed hex. But I admit, it's after midnight local time; I'm tired and I might not follow my own reasoning in the morning. Thanks for reading. John Best jlbest@tuscola.net