Rules

 This page contains some rules modifications I have made a feel worth adding to the blog.

Portable Napoleonic Wargame

I have been using the original Portable Wargame for a while for my 19^th Century 54mm Toy Soldier games and occasional North West Frontier Games.  My regular opponent, Anthony, and I enjoy the rules coupled with the scenarios from Neil Thomas’s One Hour Wargames.  You have to tweak the maps as the Portable Wargame needs a lot more scenery, but they work well together.

I read through the Napoleonic Book when it was published but had some issues with it as it didn’t really seem to capture the flavour of Napoleonics as I wanted to play them.  Recently I have picked them up again and have jotted down some ideas on how to change it into something more Napoleonic in flavour.

I am only looking at the Battalion level rules as the bigger scale rules break the advantage of grid based games for me in that they allow more than one unit in a grid – that is a red line for our grid games.  One unit, one grid square.

1.       Squares.  The rules state that Squares have no flanks or rear.  I would agree with this for melee, but Squares should be extremely vulnerable to fire combat, so ignore the ruling for Fire combat and add the bonuses.

2.       Unit Types

The rules as written allow for rifle armed infantry but ignore French (and other nation’s) skirmishers and fail to differentiate between different cavalry classes.  The unit types are now:

Infantry
Skirmishers
Light Cavalry
Heavy Cavalry
Field Artillery
Horse Artillery
Commanders

Rifles will have an advantage of one extra grid square range over muskets.

3.       Ignore exhaustion point.
I have never understood how this rule is supposed to work in practise.  Once a side reaches its exhaustion point it stops attacking, then the game ends when the other side reaches exhaustion point.  In my experience, when one side stops attacking it has lost and the other side NEVER reaches its exhaustion point as it can pick attack points and gang up on the inactive enemy.  We use scenarios with a fixed turn length instead.

4.       Commanders
These no longer add +1 to fire and melee combat, but instead add to the morale throw of a unit if they occupy the same grid square.

5.       Fire Combat.
Some changes to the fire combat table to account for squares, etc

6.       Close combat.
This is the major problem with the rules for me and I dislike the “newer” combat system where you roll for your own unit as a saving throw.  It seems to result in too many melees where neither side scores a hit and which grind on and on.

I am changing this to give a unit a factor depending on which type of enemy enemy they are facing and then using opposed die rolls.  Unless the modified die rolls are equal, someone always wins the melee and causes damage.

7.       Morale Test
I like the fact that sometimes you have to choose between falling back or staying and taking damage.  However, sometimes falling back is a better result than taking a point of damage.  We use the “instant death” method of morale in our 19^th century games, so a unit either falls back or is destroyed – giving a much quicker game.

In this case I am going to change the test such that a unit always take 1 SP damage if it is hit.

The morale test determines that if you fail you fall back a grid square.  You can stay where you are but will take an extra 1sp of damage.

I will keep a similar table to the “Hasty Square” table for cavalry attacking infantry.

PDF of rules changes below:

Rules Changes