Review of Lasalle Napoleonic rules, Sam Mustafa.
Review by David Brown
Napoleonic wargame rules are like busses at the moment, nothing to attract attention for a while and all or a sudden you're lost in the rush.
Sam Mustafa's Lasalle rules are among probably half a dozen, perhaps more, recently-published rules sets that will compete for player attention.
Lasalle is the first of the Honour series that the author intends to roll out over the next few years. Lasalle is the tactical level game while Blucher, an army-level game, is proposed for a possible 2011 release, I think. Others flagged in the series include an ACW set while the author has hinted that an 18th century set may follow.
Is Lasalle the holly grail of Napoleonic wargaming? Is it a set so popular and well-crafted that it unifies the player base and generates a buzz attracting new players and tempting old hands out of their dens – the way DBx did for ancients and FOW for WWII?
Of course only time will tell.
The rules are superbly presented in 136 full-colour pages (albeit two are adds for sellers of fine lead) that include eye candy photos of figurines and many crisp diagrams to help explain rules.
To summarise these rules in a brief phrase I'd call them ‘Demolition Derby' Napoleonic rules – which I'll explain later.
Lasalle is also very well organised and clearly written, the rules are rules, while commentary, colour and justifications are often separated out into breakout boxes. All rules writers should take a look at this approach, it takes discipline to not load your rules clauses with things that are not actually rules of play.
The presentation and organisation of the rules shows an author of some experience, indeed Mustafa has previously published Might and Reason and Grande Armee both well-regarded sets.
These are very clearly written rules. You know what the author intends, which is not to say that everything you need will be in there, an on-line errata is rounding up stray glitches.
Experienced gamers will also spot rules clauses where the author has employed a ‘gadget' rule to fix a problem that has obviously raised its ugly head in some past game.
Scale and Scope
Lasalle is a tactical level game, or petit tactical as the author says. Armies are comprised of units, being battalions, regiments etc, of 4 or 6 stands for horse and foot (ie ‘small' and ‘large' units) and mostly 4-base artillery units with armies totalling perhaps 12-18 units.
The armies are scalable to go much larger if desired.
The troop scale is a function of how many figs you want, the ground scale has musketry range roughly equal to the width of a battalion in line – which is a sound yardstick for such things.
The author suggests the 12-18 unit game will play as a 2-3 hour game. Now 90% of rules authors underestimate the time games will take, a good rule of thumb is to add an hour to their estimate.
Even if Lasalle is in the 10% accurately predicted, there's a deal of difference between a 2-hour and 3-hour game in a competition / convention setting. Even with dead administration time and meal breaks you can play three 2-hour games in a day, but you can't do it with games that play for 3 hours. Trust me, I've been running comps for 25 years.
These rules can be used with figures of any scale, and suggested basing is shown for 6mm figs up to 28mm. Basing is explained on a free download on the Honour website, pretty much any existing basing scheme can be used but there are recommended options.
A criticism I have with many wargame rules, and I'll continue it here with these, is that they have such high barriers to player entry including that they require so many inputs of figures and there fore money and or time to collect and paint.
Even an average 15-unit army for these rules could mean 360+ figs at the recommended basing.
These rules look to have dodged another ugly barrier to player entry – complexity of rules.
Machinery
Troops are defined by esprit (in three grades) and discipline also in three grades, the last of which, ‘Irregular' sorta turns troops into lights as well. Some special characteristics are available such as Lancer, Shock and Pursuit for cavalry, Guards for all while guns are foot or horse and also heavy, medium or light (with a possible howitzer designation).
Skirmisher foot are present as markers to show unit's skirmishing power rated from 0-3, a relative advantage may improve your success in a fire-fight.
Formations are line, square, attack column, and march for foot, march, waves and abreast for cavalry and limbered or unlimbered for artillery. (There are some other special cases.)
Combat is everything in these rules, some might say the only thing.
Earlier I described these rules as Demolition Derby Napoleonics because so much of the rules ballast has been absorbed by the combat engine and other sections are subservient to it.
The engine may well be a Ferrari, the working parts are elegant and boiled down to the essentials.
The actual mechanism for computing combat follows a scheme popular in recent times, your troops will have so many dice to roll depending on type, formation and situation and will have to score a certain number on each dice (with some modification for situation) to get ‘hits'. Bucket'o'dice as some will say.
The various modifications to the dice are pared back to elegant essentials (eg, one mechanism has cavalry halve their dice allowance vs foot in square, foot not in square halve their dice vs cavalry etc).
I expect players will be able to memorise the combat factors.
Troop state is determined by a disorder level, units can suffer disorder points up to their number of stands. Combat ‘hits' are checked against a chart to convert to disorder, DISR, suffered by the unit. Stands are not removed.
Disorders can be repaired, units with only one disorder remaining can't initiate attacks, units with a disorder level equal or greater to their number of stands are dead and removed.
Command and control is virtually non-existent in these rules. Units without officers in command range may face some penalties or bars, but you the player have no decisions to make, everything that can be done in a turn will be done, there's no prioritising of actions and decisions that you get with a limited action point system.
Morale is also broadly absent in these rules, which will raise a few eyebrows. Now there is a range of after-combat outcomes which will show troops conceding ground or advancing, or indeed failing to form square in time and that sort of thing. But there are no rules to test troops' resolve when, say, friends rout or generals die, your troops drive around happily until they are clubbed out or the army breaks.
If I understand the author's intent, games with these rules are meant to be a slice of a bigger action – so having your chaps happily perform when their comrades are being destroyed can be rationalised. Your army is on a mission. However, I'm not sure if players will buy that abstraction.
Broader army morale is based on a 1/3rd losses threshold. Units have a 3-2-1 ‘power' rating depending on size and type, your army is the sum of this power and when 1/3 is lost the army faces a dice chance of defeat (game loss) each turn thereafter. [The actual rule here looks broken, but that can wait for another day.]
Sequence of Play
Lassale is a simple ugo/igo system, the sequence of play looks good, and has attracted some comment as being non-traditional: to excerpt the hint in the rules;
You React and Shoot
You Defend in combat
You Move
You Recover
End your turn
Back up
Back up for theses rules is excellent, the author has said there will be no supplements to purchase – everything is going on the website. Which will include extra army lists scenarios player aids and errata or whatever. Players are encouraged to add their own materials and debate the offerings. The rules also include three historical scenarios for you to play straight away.
The published volume has army lists for the six major European powers and examples of smaller states, some of whom can provide allied contingents to the majors.
Armies are chosen from one of five ‘Theatres" Conquest 1805-07, Empire 08-12, Peninsular 08-13, Liberation 13-14, Hundred Days 1815.
You select one core list which is roughly 7-10 units depending on size and quality, there is no internal choice for the actual units.
Then you add one or more Brigades, which provide another 4-7 units each. Armies can have a choice of brigades, each of which tends to specialise troop types, for example a French Light Cavalry Brigade provides two Hussar units, two Chasseur units and a Horse battery (+ an officer for the lot). Again there is no internal choice within the Brigade.
You build larger armies by adding Brigades.
Optional and Advanced Rules
When I see optional rules in a set I immediately wonder if it's the dumping place for afterthoughts, half-baked ideas, unplaytested items or similar. If they are good rules why not include them in the main section?
Some of the rules here look untenable but having sorted them out I think players should move to include them as soon as possible as they add colour and variety.
Terrain
The rules include a player-generated terrain system where one of 12 prepared maps are rolled for and then modified by the defender opting for up to two additional features and the attacker opting for up to one more.
How will they play?
Here's where I get out the crystal ball, you can predict only so far but some things stand out.
Firstly Lasalle games look like they will be pretty ‘linear' to play. Any game that does not have limited or random activation for units will develop in a reasonably predictable way. I just know that my opponent can't radically change the axis of his assaults when he can't multi-move to shift troops from one sector to another and hope to get inside my reaction time.
I know where assaults will happen because the other player is limited only by his willingness to take any risks.
This is compounded in Lasalle as armies set up in a traditional box (if I've done my sums right, 1/5th of the way in on a standard table), one player puts all of the army down, none of which can be ‘hidden' from the other player, and then the other does the same.
There is a mechanism for nominated reserve brigades to dice for later arrival (they must so dice to arrive) but there is no option for flank-marches, stragglers, night fighting, ambushes, pre-battle exhaustion, forced marchers, isolated town garrison or whatever.
We have a very traditional set-up where armies face each other, prepared and ready to go, and advance forward to make a contact line /area.
Replayability is now a word. I'll let it mean the capacity of a game to hold players' interest in it because they see new depth in it each time they play, they can see themselves getting better, they can think of new tactics and they can build armies to match their tactics.
In short, players want to keep playing it. I worry for the replayabilty of these rules because the combat engine, while neat, will soon enough reveal its secrets.
Players will soon learn their chances of unit X prevailing vs unit Y. Now this can be a good thing and lead to high-level excellent play when paired with a random activation component allowing you to decide on high-risk high reward-strategies or grind.
The composition of armies, where there is little internal choice, may also reduce replayability as there's a real chance of meeting much the same enemy over again.
Why these rules may succeed
They will succeed because they are beautifully presented and clearly written. The main combat engine is elegant and of a type many players are familiar with.
The author is clearly highly knowledgeable in the period and happily and promptly answers question and comments on his website. The web-site back up is first class as errata and tips and expansions can grow there.
The army builder / lists in the rules mean people can play a game that has grounding in history but still allows for diversity.
Why these rules may fail
Players may not buy the concept of a streamlined smaller-scale tactical game that still needs 300-400 figs, a big table and 3+ hours.
The lack of command and control and morale rules may put off players. There are some unfortunate gonzo and ‘snakes and ladders' rules.
The rules look like they may give a too predictable game and ‘replayability' may not be high.
Conclusion
These are probably the best of the recent batch of Napoleonic rules (I leave aside the Fat Lardies' offering about which I know too little), if that sounded a left-handed compliment, it meant to.
Many horse and musket rules are just cobbled together dross. Others are poisoned with detail.
Even though you will get a good game out of Lasalle I think they expose the failings of rules that use multi-base unit armies, you get stuck with a force of 10-18 units because that's all they can handle.
Once you have your 10-18 unit army your rules make a choice about where to load up detail, perhaps combat, command, troop state, troop classifications or whatever – but there's a total load that can't be passed before the game breaks down.
Lasalle has pushed the detail into the combat engine – give it a drive and see how it handles.
David Brown
gets started with Flintloque.
