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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Tops and Bottoms. Well, it has been a while since the last diary entry. As I look at the dates, I am struck again (as I often am and no doubt you are too) by what an incredibly slow designer I am. So what’s been going on? Well, playtesting mostly. As I’ve been wearing out testers, the pace of testing has slowed, which has caused the design time to drag out as well. All my fault of course: the testers have done fine work in spite of being sent into the salt mines again and again. However, this diary entry isn’t actually about that. It is about the game box.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: A Sticky Subject. I thought I’d use this diary entry to show you what the sticker sheet for the blocks looks like, and to explain something about the opposing armies and how they are represented in the game. While I talked about the sticker design from a graphical perspective, and I’ve posted several articles about the opposing armies from a historical perspective, I thought with this diary entry I’d aim for the middle: how the armies in history are translated into armies in the game.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: The Times, They are A-Changin’.Wow! Long time since the last entry. As it happens, this entry is about time, so at least the delay comes at an appropriate time. One of the problems with doing a Gettysburg game is that it was such a long battle: 3 days, and long summer days at that. If you go with 1 hour turns (let alone the monster games’ time frame of 20 minutes a turn or even less), a Gettysburg game will generally top 50 turns. That’s a lot of turns. Now wargamers are a tough lot and conditioned to accept games with a very long playing time, but I have a strong preference in favor of reasonably short playing times, and this entry is about my efforts to manage playing time.
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Maria. In partnership with its publisher, Histogame, Simmons Games is delighted to offer Histogame’s Maria. Maria is based on the War of the Austrian Succession, in which the young Austrian queen Maria Theresa attempted to preserve her inheritance against an alliance of great powers, each coveting a different part of her domains. It is a game for 3 players, although it includes a 2-player option as well. In its 3-player version, one player takes Austria, one takes France and its ally Bavaria, and the third takes Prussia and the British-led Pragmatic Army. Maria’s game system is based on the award-winning Friedrich, and includes the same mix of traditional card games and wargames, and adds a new element of Machiavellian political intrigue.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Quiddity. In medieval philosophy (My man Thomas Aquinas!) there was a concept called quiddity. The idea of quiddity was that for every thing, there was an essential quality possessed by that thing that made it what it was. In starting a game on Gettysburg, I felt that my first problem was to decide on the quiddity of Gettysburg: What was it about the battle of Gettysburg that made it what it was? It was an important question because that which was central to the battle also had to be central to the game, or it wasn’t a game on the battle. When I worked on Napoleon’s Triumph I had decided early on that the quiddity of Austerlitz was that it was an ambush: if I didn’t have an Allied attack into a French trap, I didn’t have Austerlitz. But what was the quiddity of Gettysburg?
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Displaced Displays. This is a light diary entry just to introduce the play aids and to show (for the first time) what the board as a whole looks like with the play aids included. Nothing too challenging, unlike the last entry, which frankly may have explained more than people really wanted to know until they were actually getting ready to play. Still, it was a worthwhile experiment and I can’t say I regret giving it a try to see how it would work. Anyway, read on without fear...
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Of Rodes Not Taken, An Early Attack. For two diary entries in a row, I’ve ended the entry with a teaser about a future entry that would actually show how attacks work in the game. No more teasing; this is it. My original idea was to use an attack from the actual battle, but none was really suitable for one reason or another as a rules illustration (excessive complexity being the most common reason). However, one of the great might-have-beens of the historical battle was a Confederate attack on Cemetery Hill on the end of 1 July, the first day of the battle. I thought that this hypothetical attack might be good raw material for a more entertaining example than something purely ahistorical, even if it was simplified from the historical model in order to make it a better teaching tool. Anyway, click on the icon to the left and read on…
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Gettysburg Ratatouille I had two reasons for doing The Guns of Gettysburg: (1) I had some ideas about fields of fire and wanted to try them out, and (2) I wanted to do a game on Gettysburg. The sad fact is, however, that there is rather a gap between the first and the second: To make a Gettysburg game, there were a lot of design problems other than those about fields of fire, and for those I had no particular ideas. This diary entry will review a list of some of the open design issues that came up during the design process, and what happened with them.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Anybody Know How to Work This Thing? In this diary entry, we’ll take a look at how the map works, particularly with regard to movement and fields of fire. To make the explanation more interesting, we’ll be showing a common situation in the early turns of the game: Buford’s Union cavalry trying to delay a Confederate advance down the Chambersburg Pike towards Gettysburg.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Oh, Say Can You See. In this diary entry, I discuss one of the most important elements in the game design: the terrain model. (The terrain model is the regulatory representation of the battlefield terrain. It determines what sort of places units can occupy on the map, how they can be oriented, what terrain is associated with what locations, and how and where units can move.) It is focused on how the model was developed, and shows the regulatory layer of the game board in its current form.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Blocking and Screening. In this diary entry, I take a break from a series of entries that have been research-focused in their content and instead discuss an area of physical and graphical design: the design of the blocks for the game. I’m sure that there was a general expectation that the blocks would be like those of the Napoleonic games, but as you will see that isn’t entirely the case. Lots of pretty pictures in this one!
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: The Tale of the Tape. In this, the fourth entry describing the differences between a Napoleonic battle such as Austerlitz and a Civil War battle such as Gettysburg, the discussion topic is the organization of the opposing armies. The analysis is quantitative, and considers not just the paper organizations but the actual strengths of the different armies on the battlefield.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Men, Mobs, and Armies. In this, the third entry describing the differences between a Napoleonic battle such as Austerlitz and a Civil War battle such as Gettysburg, the discussion topic is the men who made up the armies at Austerlitz and Gettysburg, and their twin heritage in both the larger societies from which they were drawn and the militaries that they entered. It is a rather wide-ranging entry, attempting a thumbnail sketch of social development in Europe and America as well as a high-level review of the origin of the national army.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Arms Across the Water.. In this, the second entry describing the differences between a Napoleonic battle such as Austerlitz and a Civil War battle such as Gettysburg, the discussion topic is weaponry. The weapons used by artillery, infantry, and cavalry are compared, with an eye towards identifying differences that should make a game about a Civil War battle different from a game about a Napoleonic battle.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: A New World.. It has of course been a while since the last design diary entry. As is an unfortunate habit of mine, I tend to get stuck on some design issue or other and not much happens for an extended period, and so it was here. While I will (eventually) provide some information on this, I really feel the need to finish up some other long planned — but unconsummated — topics first. My last two games were both on Napoleonic subjects, and in doing a game on an American Civil War battle, I am shifting 60 years forward in time and 4000 miles west to a new continent. In doing so, there are of course differences in what is being simulated; Napoleonic and Civil War battles were different. Before going into how these differences were addressed, I thought it appropriate to first summarize what I thought the important differences were, and the battlefield terrain seemed like a good place to start.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Open Source. The previous entries pretty much covered the map-making process from a research and graphical perspective, up to the point where the game “grid” (loosely speaking in this case) is applied. Before moving on to that subject, I wanted to post the source maps that were used. And so, here is the list. The maps are all online (except of course, for the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg maps, which are protected by copyright) for your viewing pleasure. The maps are, of course, also accessible from the research section of the website.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: In Whose Name? Adding names to the map is an exercise that is at once trivial, vexing, and rewarding. It is trivial because it is hard to really feel like you’re doing anything in the least bit creative while you’re doing it: you read the name on your source, you add it to your map, and repeat, repeat, repeat. It can be vexing because different sources don’t necessarily agree on spelling, and it is hard to feel productive when you’re spending time trying to figure out whether the name of a feature is “Herr Ridge” or “Herr’s Ridge". It can be rewarding because oddly enough, when you’re done, it rather magically converts your work from a picture to a map. Such is the power of words and the such is hold of language on our consciousness.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Two Watches. “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.” – Segal’s Law. This entry is about the research headache introduced by two credible but conflicting maps for the town of Gettysburg and the process that led to the creation of the map for the game board. Also covered are the addition of the various farm buildings on the battlefield and the process by which the buildings on the southern edge of the board (which the primary source map does not cover) were reconstructed.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Road Show. To me, the visual signature of maps of the Gettysburg battlefield is the network of roads converging on Gettysburg from all points of the compass. This convergence of roads is in fact why a battle occured at Gettysburg in the first place; with both armies moving around in a relatively small area in southern Pennsylvania, Gettysburg was a hard place for them to avoid. This diary entry is about the creation of the road network for the game board.
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Topographische Karte 1:25,000
(Topographic Maps 1:25,000) by the Heer Generalstab (Germany). This is a series of 1:25,000 maps published by the German General Staff prior to World War II. The large scale of these maps makes them suitable for battlefield research, although of course care must be taken when used for battles which occured over a century before they were made. Typically they are best used in combination with period maps, which lack the topographic information and accurate scales of these maps. The online collection includes maps of the battlefields of Bautzen, Dresden, Preussisch-Eylau, Friedland, Jena-Auerstadt, and Lützen. German, English.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: A Stone’s Throw. One odd feature of the Gettysburg battlefield were the boulder fields near its southern end (around Little Round Top and Devil’s Den). The 1868 map showed them, but none of the other main source maps I was using did. This was particularly a problem regarding the southern end of the game map, which the 1868 map did not cover. It occured to me that fields of giant boulders weren’t likely to be things that would change very much over time and so a modern source might still be quite good, and this is what led me to pull the satellite imagery I’ve shown bits of in previous diary entry.
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Karte der osterr.-ungar. Monarche im Masse von 1:75,000
(Map of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the scale of 1:75,000) by the Militargeographisches Institut (Austria-Hungary). This is a series of 1:75,000 maps published by the Austro-Hungarian government starting in the last decades of the 19th century. The maps in the series were repeatedly revised and re-published in the decades that followed. The large scale of these maps makes them suitable for battlefield research, although of course care must be taken when used for battles which occured decades before they were made. Typically they are best used in combination with period maps, which lack the topographic information and accurate scales of these maps. The online collection includes maps of the battlefields of Austerlitz and Aspern-Essling/Wagram. German, English.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Can’t See the Forest. Where good quality contemporary maps of a battlefield are unavailable, reconstruction of tree cover can be a major challenge. Over time, naturally wooded areas can be cleared for agricultural or other uses, and cleared land can be abandoned and left to return to its natural state. These sorts of changes follow no fixed and general rules. A modern map used as a source may show tree cover that is quite close or quite different from what it was at some earlier time, but without an older map to use for comparison, there is no reliable way to tell which is the case. This diary entry describes the process of reconstruction of tree cover for the game map, and also how it was rendered in the map art.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Unbottled Water. Having dealt with relief in the last entry, this entry will take up one of the major forces of nature that creates relief: water. From a research point of view, Gettysburg poses no particular challenges, but hydrology can be a problem in map development. While relief generally changes only slowly, hydrology is different; both natural and man-made events can produce very substantial changes in short periods of time, which has the potential to greatly complicate battlefield reconstruction.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: What a Relief! This design diary entry opens up the topic with a discussion of mapboard development by discussing how the relief layer of the mapboard is researched and represented. This is done in the context of the history of cartography and wargame design. This may be my favorite design diary entry ever; much of it is material that I’ve been wanting to write about for some time but have never been able to pull together into a coherent article before. Oh, and did I mention that it has lots of pretty pictures? Design diary entries are just so much more fun when well-illustrated.
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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary: Battery D. As promised, this entry deals with the cover art and box design. The photograph is of Battery D, 2nd U. S. Artillery Regiment, and was taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, and developed and published by Alexander Gardner. The diary entry gives some background on the photograph itself, how it was selected for the game box, and how the general design of the game box was built around it. As is sometimes the case with me, the subject has much more to do with graphic design as history than game design per se, which some may of course find more interesting than others. Oh, and also, those who find stories of obsessive behavior enjoyable may also find something here to their taste.
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The Guns of Gettysburg. Now in development, this is a simulation of the battle of Gettysburg, fought on July 1-3, 1863. After his stunning triumph at Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee decided to carry the war to the North in the hopes that a victory on Northern soil would win the war for the Confederacy. Opposing his Army of Northern Virginia was the Union army of the Potomac, which was in a leadership crisis that would result in a new commander, George Meade, being named in the middle of the campaign. Only two days after Meade took command, a Union cavalry division outside of Gettysburg came under attack by a Confederate infantry division. The engaged commanders called for reinforcements, and more and more units from both sides rushed to the scene. Without anyone having planned or intended it, the decisive battle of the campaign, and perhaps the war, was underway.
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Napoleon’s Triumph Sample Game
, by Will Green, Clark Millikan, and Bowen Simmons. Although I had generally been reluctant to publish sample games, as I thought that one of the great pleasures of gaming is learning the game through experience, the popularity of the sample game on Bonaparte at Marengo published here has led me to soften that position. This sample game differs from the previous game in several ways: first, since it was a live game rather than a PBEM game, it doesn’t have the move-by-move precision of its predecessor. What it does have, however, is a set of parallel commentaries, one by each player, as to what they were thinking as the game proceeded, whereas the previous game summary was completely without commentary. As a bonus, the entire game is presented as a QuickTime movie at the end of the essay. Enjoy!
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King of Siam and Napoleon’s Triumph. To celebrate the continuing partnership of Simmons Games and Histogame, a special promotional bundle is now available: King of Siam and Napoleon’s Triumph can be bought together for a price of $74.95. This amounts to over 20% off the regular price of the two games bought separately!
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King of Siam In partnership with its publisher, Histogame, Simmons Games is delighted to offer Histogame’s King of Siam. King of Siam is based on the struggle for power in Siam in the late nineteenth century. It is is a game for two, three or four players. In a political power struggle, the players try to maneuver one of the three contending factions (the Malay, Lao, and Rama) into power while simulataneously gaining influence over that faction. The game is even easier to learn than Friedrich, and plays fast: a typical game will be completed in an hour. After the initial set-up, there is no chance in King of Siam: each player has the same set of eight action cards and must out-think his opponents to seize the prize. Game play is subtle and rewards indirection and thinking ahead. Anyone who enjoys strategy games can enjoy King of Siam.
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Il Trionfo di Napoleone: Regolamento. Thanks to the efforts of Maurizio Bignoli, an Italian translation of the Napoleon’s Triumph rules are now available.
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October 1, 2007
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Il Trionfo di Napoleone: Regolamento. Thanks to the efforts of Maurizio Bignoli, an Italian translation of the Napoleon’s Triumph rules are now available.
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September 29, 2007
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El Triunfo de Napoleón: Reglas del Juego. Thanks to the efforts of Eva M. Crespo, a Spanish translation of the Napoleon’s Triumph rules are now available.
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August 3, 2007
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Napoleons Triumph: Spielregel. Thanks to the efforts of Richard Stubenvoll (the designer of Friedrich), a German translation of the Napoleon’s Triumph rules are now available.
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Napoléon’s Triumph: Règles du jeu. Thanks to the efforts of Michael Lepetit a French translation of the Napoleon’s Triumph rules are now available.
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July 8, 2007
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Napoleon's Triumph. Major update on the game. The game’s pages for the game are now up. You can now see actual photographs of the box, game board, pieces, and rules. Also news is the scheduled ship date for this long-awaited game: August 15, 2007. More big news is the price: just $59.95; only $10.00 more than the price for Bonaparte at Marengo despite the fact that the new game has a board that is twice the size of the older game, has German-style folds (no valleys for the pieces to slip into!), twice as many pieces, and full-color rules. The biggest news, however, is that the game is now available for pre-order at a special price of $49.95 if you place your order before the scheduled ship date on Aug. 15, 2007. Click here to see Napoleon’s Triumph in all it’s glory!
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February 12, 2007
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Bonaparte at Marengo Sample Game
, by Dick Jarvinen, George Fagin, and Garry Haggerty. Designer's Comment: Normally the article summary comes from the authors of the article, however, in this case, I thought it best to write the summary myself. For a long time, I resisted including an article such as this on the website as I felt that one of the great pleasures of Bonaparte at Marengo is learning the game yourself and experiencing those "Ah-ha!" moments of understanding. Learning the game through an article like this must necessarily deprive the reader of that experience. Still, I have also noticed that some people never learn the game at all because the number of novel elements is so great that it overwhelms them, leaving them uncertain as to how to move even the first piece on the first turn. Reading this article can help with that. I have also noticed some people who have had their experience ruined through rules misunderstandings. Reading this article can help with that too. In the end, I thought it best to leave it to readers to make their own judgements as to whether or not an article like this is for them. The authors worked hard to prepare this article, and I am rather ashamed to admit I did not publish it nearly as promptly as I should have; I suppose it was only when the prospect of publishing it was actually at hand that I realized just how conflicted my feelings on this subject were. In any case here it is (finally).
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July 25, 2006
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Less is More & More is More.
This entry presents a new draft of the rules, with simplifications of the combat rules that are the result of feedback from the
blindtesting process, new attack examples to ease learning of those rules (which are really the heart of the entire game), and
various other revisions and changes. Text changes from the previous draft that do not change the content of the rules are in blue.
Actual rules changes that alter the way the game is played are in red. As always, feedback is welcome and can be sent by email to
or posted to the Simmons Games thread at talk.consimworld.com.)
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July 13, 2006
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Small Changes.
This is a new draft of the rules, with some small changes (thanks to those who responded with their questions and comments).
Because the changes are infrequent and scattered, significant changes (as opposed to mere corrections of typos) are in red to make them easier to find.
As before, volunteer proofreaders are invited to give the rules a once-over; comments can be sent by email to
or posted to the Simmons Games thread at talk.consimworld.com.)
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June 30, 2006
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, A Quick One.
Wow, what a lot of responses to the last rules draft! Here is a new draft incorporating suggestions from quite a few folks.
There are no rules changes as such, but there are quite a few clarifications and corrections. While some of these are just
the corrections of typos, there is a package of changes that have a unified object: to make the attack rules clearer to
Bonaparte at Marengo veterans, by giving more emphasis to points where the two games
differ. The most substantial change has been to the attack example, which has been substantially altered to make it look less
like a Bonaparte at Marengo assault (it now shows units in reserve participating, whereas in the previous example all the
units blocking). As before, volunteer proofreaders are invited to give the rules a once-over; comments can be sent by email to
or posted to the Simmons Games thread at talk.consimworld.com.)
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June 29, 2006
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Picture Show.
This entry essentially is just an illustrated inventory of the game components. Regular readers of the diary will have already
seen much of this, though it has never all been collected in one place before. It is not utterly without novelty, however. This
entry does provide the first look at what the back of the box will be like, and it also includes minor updates to the map and
rules. Any volunteer proofreaders who want to
give the map and/or the rules a once-over, by all means: your feedback is welcome! (Comments can be sent by email to
or posted to the Simmons Games thread at talk.consimworld.com.)
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June 21, 2006
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Romancing the Stone.
This entry updates the general design status (command pieces excepted, which were covered in the previous entry) and
what has been going on with the game since the last general diary update in *cough* December 2005. You can see the
current mapboard and download the current draft of the rules. Things are in very good shape at this point, and the map
and rules are expected to be very close to what will ultimately be published. Any volunteer proofreaders who want to
give the map and/or the rules a once-over, by all means: your feedback is welcome! (Comments can be sent by email to
or posted to the Simmons Games thread at talk.consimworld.com.)
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June 14, 2006
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Round and Round We Go.
Six months. Six months? Six months??? What on earth has been going on all this time with
Napoleon’s Triumph? For the first part of the answer, click and read.
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May 25, 2006
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Bonaparte at Marengo: Rules of Play. We have an update to the rules for
Bonaparte at Marengo. This update, available in English,
German,
French,
Spanish, and
Italian, was added for two reasons: first, to clarify a long-standing
ambiguity as to whether splitting a group after a blocked maneuver attack would cost a command or not (it does), and second,
to change an equally long-standing inconsistency in the rules regarding cavalry continuation that allowed cavalry to use a
primary road for continuation if moving one or more locales, but not if moving in the locale in which it started. This revision,
which has been in placed for some time as a semi-official optional rule, is now the standard rule.
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Atlas to Accompany the Official Records
by the
US War Dept.
The documents being published as the official records were frequently accompanied by maps and other
images that could not be printed as in the OR volumes proper due to their physical size and the need for
color printing. To accomodate these materials, an over-size full-color Atlas was also prepared. This Atlas,
formally titled the "Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies",
contained over 1000 maps and other images. Almost all of the maps were drawn up during the war itself
by the participants, although some general images are pre-war and some others were drawn up for historical
purposes after the war was over. Important Note: Map pages are numbered using Roman Numerals
(I, II, III, etc.)
Scanned (complete).
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May 7, 2006
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Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
by the
US War Dept.
Six new volumes have been added (volumes 1-5 of series II and volume 1 of series III). The books in Series II deal with
political oppression during the war and with prisoners of war. The books in series III deal with principally with the Union
military mobilization and the economics of waging the war. (Series IV does for the Confederates what Series III does for
the Union, but none of the volumes of Series IV have been added to the site yet).
HTML (English – very partial – Series I, Vol.
1-9,50, Series II, Vol 1-5, Series III, Vol. 1.).
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May 1, 2006
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Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
by the
US War Dept.
Three new volumes have been added (8, 9 and 50 of series I). These volumes complete the Series I coverage of 1860
and 1861 (volume 50 actually covers the entire war for California).
HTML (English – very partial – vol. 1-9,50).
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April 28, 2006
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Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
by the
US War Dept.
Two new volumes have been added (6 and 7 of series I). Also, the HTML files have been split up to make the files
less difficult for web browsers to handle. The old organization had one file per chapter, the new one has
typically three files per chapter (one for reports, one for Union correspondence, and one for Confederate
correspondence). The files are still quite large, unfortunately. It would have been possible to break up the
“reports” sections further, but the “correspondence” sections lack any intermediate structure between the level
of the chapter and the individual document, and it was thought best to keep the file organization consistent between
reports and correspondence.
HTML (English – very partial – vol. 1-7).
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April 25, 2006
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Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
by the
US War Dept.
This massive 128 volume work is a collection of official military documents from the American Civil War,
from both the Union and Confederate armies. Although the full title is “The War of the Rebellion: A
Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies”, it is known to anyone who’s
ever done research in the ACW as simply the OR. The compilation was authorized by act of Congress in
1874, but is completion was the work of many years. Although this collection deals only with the armies,
there was a second collection made for the navies, called the Official Records of the Union and
Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (known as the ORN). Praise for the OR is superfluous:
it is THE essential source for research on the war.
HTML (English – very partial – vol. 1-5).
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April 21, 2006
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Book Viewer Tool.
There have been HTML versions of a number of source works on the site for some time. While HTML
is preferable to scanned images of pages for many purposes, it is not always so. Sometimes the advantages of
fast loading speed, ease of search, and appearance matters less than complete fidelity: no matter how carefully
proofed, conversion from the original printed form to HTML inevitably introduces some errors. Because of this,
a book viewer tool has been added to allow viewing and navigation of scanned books. While it is possible to
navigate the entire scanned book with the tool, the tool is also integrated with the HTML pages: to bring up the
image of a page, just click on the page number in the HTML,
and it will be displayed in the book viewer. Books currently supporting this are Berthier’s
Relation de la Bataille de Marengo, and Cugnac’s
Campagne de L’Armée de Réserve en 1800.
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April 11, 2006
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Holding the Fontanone in Bonaparte at Marengo
, by Jonathan Arkley.
No part of Bonaparte at Marengo is more crucial than the opening moves.
At the start of the game the French player is faced with a flood of Austrian pieces pouring across the two
bridges spanning the Bormida, with his own pieces still encamped and unable to react. How on earth is
the French player to hold back this tide? This article is aimed at new players to the game from the point of
view of the French during this critical phase, and attempts to answer this vital question. As will soon be
made clear, the key to the problem is a seemingly innocuous band of blue across the map - the Fontanone.
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