Found this oldie over the weekend...looks like someone used it as a coaster for awhile. The back is stained even worse and has several circles, probably from a coffee cup. This takes me back... Back before I ever saw a copy of White Box, back before White Box was even published there was the hobby of historic miniatures wargaming. The authors of the White Box, and many of it's earliest players, had been wargamers for some time prior to White Box bringing about the new hobby of role-playing. I was one of those wargamers.
Napoleonique was a game for playing with historic miniatures set during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th Century and an influential set of rules for the hobby in its day. Those of us playing back in 1970 know how much of a jump ahead in rules design this little book was. Before Napoleonique we had rules like Column, Line and Square and Frappe, cumbersome 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 figure scales that required tons (literally) of figs. and revolved around changing formation and fighting as a battalion! The idea was to paint 100 figures and bunch them together shoulder to shoulder and you have your battalion. Now measure out your movement so you can change from column to line or square (this is literally done one stand of 4-5 figures at a time and may take a number of turns, as I recall). Tactics involved getting your "boys" into a good formation in time to be effective. Being shot at or charged whilst changing formation was usually how "battles" were lost. The figs. were twenties or twenty-fives (20mm or 25mm tall) so they take up a lot of room. You can get two battalions on the dinner table, more troops and you are on your knees on the basement floor.
Jim Getz (co-author of Empire III) really did the young hobby a great favor and perhaps kept it alive when he re-invented the way we played with Napoleonique. Using a troop scale of 1:30 those battalions we had been building became regiments or brigades and we were able to add cavalry and artillery and to fight combined arms engagements (still on the floor). The rules glossed over a lot of the detail that earlier systems had focused on so that we "generals" could concentrate on commanding groups of units up to about a corps. The hobby really came-of-age using Jim Getz-style rules and I don't think he gets the credit he should. Mr. Getz is I believe the first and if not the first, then the person who made it popular to play wargames in the modern style rather than the old small unit/toy soldier style of other rules authors including H.G. Wells, Fletcher Pratt and Fred Vietmeyer. Napoleonique seems to me to be the inspiration for later rules such as Empire, Fire and Steel, Rally Round the Flag and many other "standard" horse & musket rules of the '70s and '80s. The next big change would come with Empire III (Scott Bowden & Jim Getz), and especially Johnny Reb (John Hill) which did away with written orders and made tedious games fun again. About the same time (late '80s), the hobby shifted to a smaller figure scale and we got off the floor! (John Hill was a big proponent of 15mm figs.)
Napoleonique also helped convert many board wargamers to miniatures by using a hexagon based ground scale familiar to anyone who played Avalon Hill or SPI map wargames (and there were a lot of us in the day). Looking at the pictures in Napoleonique of hex boards and Der Kriegspielers miniatures brings back a lot of great memories. Der Kriegspielers was an early manufacturer of gaming miniatures and rules under the leadership of Duke Seifried based out of a hobby shop he owned called The Tin Soldier. Mr. Seifried, always a great promoter, brought a lot of us into the hobby over the years and has had wide-reaching positive influence wherever he went. I feel fortunate to have grown-up when I did, where I did, meeting the people I did, and being so close to Dayton, Ohio, a hot-bed of gaming ingenuity in the '70s. Who knew!
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