For many scenario games, WR’s monthly third saturday napoleonic 28mm group just arrange set piece scenarios based upon a pre-determined number of points. Normally one player is assigned for each team side and given x points to create a rostered army from a chosen napoleonic nationality or allied army format (Russians, Prussian, Austrians vs. France and her common allied states). These armies are typically optimum tuned with the best of the nationality for tabletop play. Even points, even command count, evenly spread out along the tabletop edge and typically even the unit count is matched up, leading to stale and predictable game. A common variant of this point assignment gaming is each player is emailed a pre-determined point amount to roster his chosen army flavor of the monthly but still free to choose what he wished to use on the tabletop. These scenarios are a bit more fun but the typical player generally choses common line infantry battalions, light or line cavalry properly ratio’d to the infantry battalions present, one size fits all command TOE structure, and artillery batteries to match his force strength. Rarely elite or guard divisions are seen, no poor 2nd grade line infantry or even militia units, never under-strength or abundance of cavalry for the amount of infantry present, common “safe” nationality armies (no Ottomans, Spanish, Germanic minor states), but all very proper TOE gaming.
The original pale yellow napoleonic command generation card deck. Still valid for today’s scenario gaming.
Well, years ago WR created a deck of yellow index cards for players to blindly card deck pull on the actual monthly game day meeting and from those cards roster a group of command from the specific command card instructions. These “command cards” recently have been converted into a MS Excel spreadsheet with a random number generation for remote (via email) player command selection. Now the participating player is faced with the problem of creating his commands to match the randomly selected Command type choice and given a fixed number of points for each command. The army nationality, and year of army organization, could still be player open choice or pre-determined for the scenario (GM decides). The Command types could greatly vary along with the actual points for the command and, expanding out, the total team side strength. How many command selection choices given out is still the GM decision but typically two command choices per team side player with additional two selections to allow discard of the weaker command selections. Sometimes an extra command selection choice is used to represent a reserve late arriving command. Now the players arrive at the monthly game with limited intelligence about their own team side and even less about the opposite team side command structure. The possibilities are nearly endless and the matchup scenario action very different from the perfectly scripted even sided scenario play. Continue reading
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