Napoleon's Last Battles

This is a hex-and-counter wargame of the Waterloo campaign of 16–18 June 1815. You move units across a hex map, attack the enemy, and try to hold the places that score victory points before the turns run out. If you have never played a wargame before, read straight through; it takes about five minutes.

1. How to begin

1. Pick a Battle from the menu at the top right. If it is your first game, choose Quatre Bras — it is the smallest and shortest.
2. Pick which side you command. The French are almost always the attacker; the Coalition (Anglo-Allied and Prussian) defends.
3. Press New game.

The italic line under the title bar tells you what your side is trying to achieve in that scenario. The right-hand panels show whose turn it is, the objectives and victory points, each army's morale, and a combat log.

2. Controls

3. Turn order

Each game turn has four phases, always in this order:

1. French movement
2. French combat
3. Coalition movement
4. Coalition combat

Then the turn number advances, any reinforcements due that turn appear at their map edge, and every unit is free to act again. The header always tells you the current turn, the phase, and whether it is you or your opponent to act.

4. Movement

Every unit is printed with two numbers, strength-movement. A counter reading 7-4 has 7 combat strength and 4 movement points. Click a unit and the hexes it can reach are highlighted; click one to move there.

What movement costs

Two rules that will catch you out

• Zones of control. Every combat unit exerts one into all six adjacent hexes. The moment you enter an enemy zone of control you must stop. You cannot slip past a defended line — you have to break it.
• Stacking. At most three combat units may share a hex. Leaders do not count.

5. Combat

Attacking is voluntary. In your combat phase, click an enemy unit outlined in red. Every eligible unit of yours adjacent to it automatically joins the attack, and the Attack panel shows the odds.

Odds are your total attacking strength compared with the defender's total defence, rounded to a column such as 1-2, 1-1, 3-1. Terrain multiplies the defence:

• Town or village — defender doubled
• Chateau — defender tripled
• Crest — defender ×1.5
• Across a stream or bridge — defender doubled
• Cavalry is halved attacking into, or defending in, forest
• A leader within two hexes adds a command bonus to the attack

Press Resolve attack and a die is rolled on the Combat Results Table. The column you are using is highlighted live as you stage the attack.

Better than 6-1 is treated as 6-1; worse than 1-5 is treated as 1-5.

Steps

Most units have two steps. The first loss flips them to their reduced side, shown by a white bar across the counter and a lower strength. The second loss removes them from the game.

6. Winning and losing

Victory points are scored for holding objective hexes — marked with a gold star, and listed in the objectives panel with who currently holds each one. Some objectives start under one side's control, so the other side must physically take them.

There are two ways a game ends:

• The turn limit is reached. Whoever has more victory points wins. If the points are level, the side that inflicted more losses wins.
• An army breaks. Each army has a morale threshold, tracked by the bars in the Army morale panel. Once its cumulative losses pass that threshold the army is demoralized: its movement is halved and it may no longer attack. If one side is demoralized and the other is not, the game ends immediately.

So you lose by running out of time short of your objectives, or by wrecking your own army trying to reach them.

7. The campaign

The campaign scenario joins all four battlefields into one board, arranged as they lie in reality, connected by the roads the armies actually marched along. It runs 26 turns.

• Distances are real. Charleroi to Quatre Bras is about nine hexes; Wavre is thirty-six. Marching a corps from one battle to another costs you turns you may not be able to spare.
• Roads halve movement, so they are worth going out of your way for.
• Reinforcements arrive on a historical schedule — Wellington's army down the Brussels road, the Imperial Guard held back until turn six, Bulow's fresh Prussian corps from the east on turn four.
• Use the objectives panel to keep track of four fronts at once. Click a battlefield's name to jump the map straight to it.

Be warned: winning both battles of 16 June is not by itself enough to win the campaign. That was rather the point of the original.

8. Saving and restarting

This release does not save games. There is no save slot, no autosave, and nothing is written to your browser's storage — closing or reloading the page ends the game in progress.

To start again at any time, choose a battle and a side and press New game. When a game finishes, the victory banner offers Play again, which restarts the same scenario.

A single battle is short enough to finish in one sitting, which is why it works this way.