I will be playing The Napoleonic Wars with Iain and Chris tomorrow, so naturally enough I am rereading the rules, which has brought back to me with pungent immediacy why I sold this game in the first place. On BGG I read quite a lot of comments along the lines of "great game - shame about the rules", but lets face it, the rules are a mess because the game is a mess. Especially the diplomatic rules. But a lot of the other stuff as well - army groups, conquest and submission, the interphase, etc etc. And why so many funny words, can't we call it a "space" instead of a "duchy"??
The developer Don Greenwood (may he live for ever) also developed ASL and Up Front (of blessed memory), and TNW has the same kind of style - exceptions piled upon exceptions piled upon tottering exceptions. Someone at GMT, Andy Lewis or Gene Billingsley, should have stepped in and said "This won't do. It really won't. Simplify it!"
Still, it was one of their biggest successes of recent years, so maybe I'm mistaken. But IMO it could have been so much better a game......
2 comments:
I'm struggling too.
Man, I am *so* with you on that. The game really is a mess. I am completely mystified by the game's appeal. If a game is going a dicefest/diplomacy combo, it should at least be not that complicated.
It feels like the same thing happened with Pursuit of Glory. Did we really need 50 pages of rules for this?
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