En Avant Napoleonic Wargames Rules

En Avant is one of Jim Wallman’s “One Brain Cell” rules, this time for Napoleonic warfare. It allows you to conduct a brigade sized engagement in about 20 minutes using 25mm – 28mm figures. Just scroll down to find the links.

Valeur et Discipline Napoleonics Website

The Valeur et Discipline site has some terrific eye candy of 25mm Napoleonic figures. My dream is to have a collection of such figs.

Waterloo Napoleonics Rules

Waterloo is a new set of Napoleonics rules, free for the downloading, from Evan Williams. The game is organized around “companies,” and statistics are for single figures.

Grognards and Grenadiers Fastplay Card Driven Napoleonic Rules

Rudi Geudens offers a new game in his Command and Colors series of free wargames rules: Grognards and Grenadiers. These Napoleonic rules are designed for fast play using a card mechanism.

Geudens writes:

This is another set of my card driven wargame rules “COMMAND BY COLOUR”, and although still loosely inspired by the Battle Cry & Memoir ’44 games by Richard Borg, this game no longer has a battlefield divided in 3 sections, because I took a different approach. The left-centre-right wing Battle Cry/Memoir ’44 principle has here been replaced by colour-coding the units red, green and blue (activated by cards of the same colour) thus enabling the players to concentrate their units anywhere on the battlefield if they wish so.

Throne of Bayonets Napoleonic Rules

Andrew Fisher has created a set of free Napoleonic wargames rules called Throne of Bayonets. Andrew writes:

I like a set of rules to tell me what it is trying to do in the introduction. This lets me get a quick idea of whether I’m likely to enjoy the game, and therefore helps me to decide whether or not to buy. Most rules allow only 5 minutes action in a 15 minute turn in order to ensure that battles last more than 20 minutes; this set uses a realistic time and ground scale to allow very quick action — sometimes — but it also ensures that a lot of time is spent in waiting for orders or in indecisive firefights and half-hearted cavalry charges. To make this workable you have to be able to play a lot of turns, so I’ve made the rules very simple, with a minimum of tables and dice roll modifications. In playtest, players using up to a division each proved able to fight in close to real time, even in their first game.

Incidentally, the title comes from a Boris Yeltsin quote from 1991: You can make a throne out of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long.