I haven't played a board wargame in some years, but there was a period in the 70s and 80s when I played virtually everything of importance in the field, and it's still a genre for which I have a high degree of empathy. While there are any number of games I remember fondly, and even a few I view as superb and worthy of study today (including Dunnigan's WWI and Chadwick's A House Divided), Zucker's Napoleon's Last Battles is a game I still think of almost sublime in its focus, concision, and all-around polish. It's also simple enough that I can suggest that, even if you never play another board wargame, you should play this one, to get a sense of what this particular genre is all about.
Napoleon's Last Battles is a simulation of the Battle of Waterloo, in four parts. It's based on Jim Dunnigan's Napoleon at Waterloo system -- a very simple wargame originally given away by SPI, the publishers of both titles, as a way to introduce new players to wargaming. Consequently, though all wargames are considerably more complex than mass-market boardgames, it's not that hard to learn. Like other games of this type, there are some artifacts of the system that mitigate against simulation -- specifically, the dynamic produced by a hexagonal placement grid combined with "locking" zones of control, which make a continuous line of units actually less defensible than a line spaced out with intervening empty hexes.
But leaving that aside, there is hardly a game that better shows what happened on the battlefield, recreates the concerns of the opposing commanders, or produces such a feeling of rightness in the educated player -- an aesthetically pleasing sense that the system, the components, and the challenges you face are both pleasurable, and a reasonable recreation of the simulated event.
(I'll note in passing that I prefer the components of the original SPI version to the current Decision Games one; Redmond Simonsen's minimalist graphic design is more elegant than the somewhat more elaborate style of the newer edition.)
NLB was originally published as a "quadrigame," four games using the same basic rules set but playable independently; the four games are based on the clashes at Quatre Bras, Ligny, Wavre, and the final day of Waterloo, which the others lead up to. Unlike most quadrigames, however, the boards of the four games that composed NLB could be abutted, with rules provided to allow you to play out the entire multi-day battle. This also provides a useful way to learn the system: start by playing Quatre Bras, with a relative handful of units and simple set-up, and once you've grasped how it works, set up and play the full game.
Quite often, when people ask whether games can have any educational value, I point to Napoleon's Last Battles as an example; you can read any number of books about Waterloo (and if you have an interest in the subject, you should); yet you gain something different, and perhaps more important, by playing a good game on the subject. Books can only describe; games can demonstrate.
Kevin continues to design and publish Napoleonic games, under the "Operational Studies Group" rubric, but I've never quite cottoned to his more complicated operational-level titles; for me, at least, NLB retains an elegance and simplicity that more than compensates for its limitations as a simulation.
