Thursday, December 23, 2010

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics

My copy of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (CCN for short) came in today. Here's a pic of all the parts:
The box is the typical thick, solid Commands & Colors: Ancients (CCA) box. Also exactly like CCA, are the painted wood blocks, with red for the British, blue for the French and dark brown for the Portuguese. My only quibble is from a distance and in poor light, the Portuguese blocks look similar to the French blocks. It would have been better if they were a light brown or beige. The stickers for the blocks have nice artwork and are labelled/coloured as to what they are, for example the stickers for French Cuirassier Cavalry are Yellow and say "CUIRASSIER". In CCN, infantry are blue, cavalry are yellow and artillery are red. There are no blocks for Victory Banners, instead there are card chits.

The dice are like CCA in that they are the black "gaming cubes" on which the stickers must be attached. The dice faces have 1 side showing cavalry, artillery, crossed sabers and a white flag and 2 sides showing infantry. The cards are also the typical high quality GMT cards that they use in most of their games.

The gameboard, unlike the gameboard in CCA, is not thick cardstock, but in fact is a good mounted board much like that in Twilight Struggle or Labyrinth. This surprised me as I was not expecting a mounted board. The terrain tiles are double sided like CCA and show: forest, hills, rugged hills, towns, field works, river, fordable river, bridge and sand quarry. There is also a track for both sides showing which units have formed squares.

Next up is the card handouts. Theses are like the ones in CCA, being of the 2 page, double sided variety. The first handout has the various terrain tile effects and a summary of the various cards. There are 2 copies of this handout. The final handout shows a listing of the ranged fire and melee dice per unit, the ranged fire and melee combat tables and on the inside shows the breakdown of each sides units and their particulars. There are 4 copies of this handout. Two of those copies only show French units on the inside and 2 copies show the British/Portuguese units on the inside.

Lastly there is a 23 page rulebook and a scenario booklet. Scenarios covered are: Rolica (2 scenarios), Vimiero, Corunna, Talavera, River Coa, Bussaco (2 scenarios), Redinha, Salamanca (2 scenarios), Garcia Hernandez, Aire, Quatre Bras and a little heard of battle called Waterloo.

I've been really looking forward to playing this game for quite a while and I'm hoping I can get in a few games before the holidays end. We'll see.

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