Rules for Napoleonic wargaming: so easy my pet could write them

My pet computer, at least.

Cover pages of a small selection of available rules for Napoleonic wargaming. Collected yesterday from Wargame Vault*.

 

While trying to catch up on some of the (too many) blogs that I follow I came across a marvellous post by Roly over at 'Dressing the Lines'.

He describes a really interesting exercise in which he and his son got the latter's AI program to write a set of rules for Napoleonic wargaming. The result is broad and pretty generic in execution, but impressive from an evening’s ‘work’. About as much ‘innovation’ as modern writers of rules come up with too! The two versions of the introduction to the rules, written by the AI are brilliant. Especially the humorous one.

I recommend the post to you if you have not read it already.

*I wanted a bit of a 'mash-up' of covers of rules for Napoleonics to use as the piccie for this post. Unable to find one I made one of my own by going to Wargame Vault, getting it to list rules for Napoleonic land warfare and then copying the covers. Interestingly, I only knew of a few of these previously and managed to obtain a couple of them in the process (oh dear!). Actually, I have changed my tune from 'there are too many rules for Napoleonics' to 'we are spoilt for choice, with options to suit most scales and tastes'. Albeit the latter has the caveat of my well-known frustration (to people who bother to read what I write) of 're-packaging' of existing mechanics into something purporting to be 'new'...

As part of my catching up on blogs, I have had a couple of 'discussions' involving responses to comments and follow-up. One of these with Robbie over at 'The Independent Wargames Group' lead him to recommend that I read a post from several years ago of his interview with Chales Wesencraft. Interesting stuff in the entirety (two posts), but one response from Charlie particularly resonated with me:

"Wells said that wargaming was like chess with a thousand pieces. It's not, and never will be. Wargamers are individuals, each has a view about how to wargame and each has a view about what they want from a game. That's one of the wonderful thing about wargames. That and the military history. It's amazing what you learn as you research a period."

I had not been doing much with figures over our early summer. A little prep. and painting but mainly mucking about with other things during 'hobby time'—especially army lists for future historic re-fights of Napoleonic battles and to ascertain what figures I still 'need' for my megalomania. I went into my shed last weekend to 'engage' with figures for the first time in around three weeks or so and also finally took some time to look at blogs.

Who knows, I may even have something worth posting in a bit...