Once upon a time, new subscribers to Strategy & Tactics magazine -- once the premier board wargaming journal -- received a free copy of Napoleon at Waterloo with their subscription. This was actually pretty generous, because NAW is a pretty good game. And it's also about as simple as board wargames get (still pretty complex by mass market boardgame standards), while serving as an excellent introduction to the core mechanics of the board wargame: combat strength and movement allowance, zones of control, the Combat Results Table, the Terrain Effects Chart.
Allan Emrich, an old school wargame designer who now runs Victory Point Games (publishers of, among other things, Israeli Independence), has put NAW up online as a free download, print-and-play style, rules HTML-ified, the map and counters as scans.
The board wargame has had largely undocumented effects on the digital games industry, not only through the computer wargame, but through many other game styles as well. Chris Crawford was a board wargamer before he became a computer game designer; the Gollop Brother's original inspiration for XCOM was the wargame Sniper!; Rick Goodman's Empire Earth series was influenced by his experiences as a board wargamer; and of course, any number of board wargame creators moved into digital games and had an impact on the form's evolution (Bruce Shelley and Jeff Briggs spring immediately to mind, though no doubt there are others).
If you're not familiar with the genre, it's worth downloading and playing NAW just to get a sense of its value and aesthetics; and if you are, of course, this is a pretty good game, for free.
The NAW system was used in a slew of additional games from SPI, the original publishers -- not only Napoleonic battle games, but also the Blue & Grey series of American Civil War Games. It's not without flaw; among other things, the granularity of the hex grid has a major impact on turn-by-turn strategy, an aspect of "gaminess" rather than genuine simulation. And to be sure, Napoleon's Last Battles, while based on the NAW system, is a richer and more colorful -- in almost every way better, if more complex -- view of the same battle. But "free" is a hard price to beat.
Custom rules
Y'know what I miss about those days? Making up your own rules. When Sniper! was fairly new, there was a TV show called S.W.A.T. that was quite popular. I made a whole set of RPG-ish rules that converted Sniper! into a SWAT-themed game. Hmm, wait...maybe it was Commando that I did that with (which already had an RPG feel to it)... Either way. The flexibility was the same in any event.
Couldn't you go into the SPI offices to buy games direct? I have a vague recollection of doing that during one of my first ventures into the city (Long Island boy here).
And don't forget: The first
And don't forget: The first version of Masters of Orion was a kissing cousin of Thompson's Stellar Conquest. If Thompson weren't holed up somewhere with his gold unicorn he might have had grounds to sue.
I intend to download N@W, and hope you point out other notable download and print boardgames you point out.
I have kicking around in my head a design of my own, an introductory operational scale wargame a bit like Tactics II but with a board assembled from a "deck" of map segments. So Red and Blue might have any sort of terrain between them. (Maybe even the buffer states Green and Purple.)
Why Hating on the Hexes?
"The granularity of the hex grid has a major impact on turn-by-turn strategy, an aspect of "gaminess" rather than genuine simulation."
This may be personal preference, but I find hexes to be a lot more accomadating than inches. I don't find using a tape measure to be that very intuitive for every movement and ranged attack.
Hexes
TheDustin: I don't object to the use of hexes per se; a hexagonal grid is superior to a square tessellation. But in NAW, attacks are resolved sequentially. Thus, let us say that you have three units in adjacent hexes, arranged in a line (anchored in some way that I can't outflank the three of them). My best strategy is to attack the left-most and right-most units, forcing them to retreat, and occupying the vacated hexes (via "advance after combat"), then attack the central unit. If it is forced to retreat, it is now "surrounded," that is, all its adjoining hexes are in my zone of control, and it is therefore destroyed.
Consequently, the most easily defensible and strongest line, in this game (and many others) is one in which every other hex is occupied, so that it is much harder, in most cases impossible, to 'surround' an enemy unit in the course of combat resolution.
Or to put it another way, in this game, the strongest defending line is not one with the maximal concentration of force, but rather a line with 50% of the maximal concentration of force.
This is contrary to reality, and therefore a "gamey" aspect, rather than an aspect that supports the simulation.
NaW was a great little game!
NaW was a great little game! It was one of the first I searched for when the web was new, hoping that it was playable online. That's too much to ask, I know, but now I can download it and not try to find the old counters.
"Y'know what I miss about those days? Making up your own rules."
Oh, yeah! TimeTripper, The Creature That Ate Sheboygan and Citadel of Blood were great for adding new enemies, weapons and treasures, and even better games for introducing people to wargaming. History? That's boring! Time travel through history, shooting Vikings and Nazis, wow AWESOME! And it was so easy to add to TimeTripper enemies like Imperial Stormtroopers (7G5G; M1 grenades no effect) and Monty Python's Blancmanges (10X12G; M26 grenades x2 in strength)!
(Stormtroopers raced up, then blasted away but missed most of the time while doing little damage, just like the Star Wars movies. Blancmanges...hope you saved up those grenades, buddy, because Mr & Mrs Samuel Brainsample aren't going to eat them. Sick teenager that I was, after the failed Reagan assassination I wrote battles where you found yourself abruptly next to world leaders, but the purpose wasn't to kill anyone but teleport the f*k out before their version of the Secret Service got you. I once was killed by the POPE. He has that big stick, you know!)
What was that later SPI introductory game, the super-simple one with NATO vs the Commies? That had like 20 counters? That was fun, too, but with my friends, sci-fi or fantasy games brought them into the hobby more than anything else. They found scenarios lifted from the movies easier to immerse themselves in.
I agree with you on square
I agree with you on square tessellation; there isn't any sound way to handle diagonal movement. I've played D&D Mini's and various Wizkids games and have found their (square) movement system to be flawed. But I have noticed the situation you outlined in games that use a hexagonal grid. After looking at various games, I've found that developers have consciously or unconsciously addressed this issue. A decent number of melee units in the wargame-lite "Heroscape" have abilities that give them stat bonuses if they are adjacent to each other. In other words, the developers make keeping your units together a more sound strategy than placing them a hex apart. Thanks for mentioning this though, I will keep this in mind while working on my wargame.
Squares
Actually, there -is- a pretty good way of handling diagonal movement, although it adds a bit of rules complexity: charge 2 movement points for crossing a square side, and 3 for moving diagonally. Since the square root of 2 is 1.4 something, charging 1.5 times the cost of moving orthogonally to move diagonally comes pretty close to equalization.
Strike Force One
The NATO type game was Strike Force One, also available from Victory Point Games. It was my first wargame I learned when my Dad got his subscription to Strategy and Tactics back in the mid 70's. I bought 9 copies late last year to give to the nieces and nephews at Thanksgiving. Just last week, I taught three of them how to play, with Abby also wanting to learn the advanced and optional rules provided by VPG. Brought back many memories... I've heard that N@W is actually a better game, but based on the comment from costik above regarding the hexes, it sounds like the system may be similar.
Computer Versions
I noted that from the page with NAW there is a link to a computer version (from 1999), and from there there was a link to a free download of a computer version, about as old, of Strike Force One. The latter even has an AI opponent they say. I have tried neither. Unfortunately they both look rather uninspiring, running in non-fullscreen mode with standard menu bars and window title bar and scrollbars etc, which is a sure way to ruin any game to me. It's not easy trying to imagine you are Napoleon at Waterloo when the UI of the game constantly remind you of office applications. I wouldn't be surprised if the games require some old Visual Basic or Delphi runtime library to play as well. I don't at all mind the simple map and unit graphics.
SF1
SF1 (http://www.wargames.otopia.co.uk/html/downloads.html) wasn't that bad actually. The UI is a bit annoying, but possibly partly because of me running it in WINE instead of Windows. The AI has won two of two games so far.
SPI subscription service
I assume everyone knows this but in case not: http://www.hexwar.com/ has a lot of the SPI games. NAW is free to play with their system but the others are pay.