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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, The Rough and the Smooth.
In this entry, we have an update of the mapboard, a new draft of the rules, and scads of commentary about the game
and its development, including quite a bit of commentary on the rules process. As before, continued thanks to all of you
volunteer proofreaders out there for your efforts.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Another Day, Another Draft.
Thanks to all my volunteer proofreaders! Here is another draft for you to chew on. The combat rules are little revised
since the previous drafts, but sections 1 to 10 have been substantially revised. The main object of the revision was to
squeeze our redundant or what I decided were fussy comments. In writing instructions, you don’t want to include steps
of the breathe-in-breathe-out variety, although it is not always obvious to the author where the line is between those and
vital information. The text also now assumes wooden command markers, which I hope from a cost perspective I don’t
live to regret, but there they are...
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Proofreader’s Delight.
Volunteer proofreader's can entertain themselves by finding problems in this, the latest draft of the Napoleon’s
Triumph rules. Thanks to those volunteers who already jumped in with previous drafts. Questions may not be
answered individually, but they are nevertheless welcome as they help identify ambiguities in the rules. In general,
each draft is the answer to questions posed in response to a previous draft. If you didn’t understand something from
the previous draft, and still don’t understand it in this one, keep asking: eventually I may get the message.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, That Was the Month That Was.
This entry includes a link to a third draft of the game rules (volunteer proofreaders will want to download it, but
otherwise it isn’t very different than the 3 December draft). This, however, is a real entry and was written as a
bookend to the 29 October design diary entry, which marked the end of a long (bad) phase of the design and
the start of a new one. This entry is also a bookend, marking the end of the highly fruitful November design
process, and Janus-like, also faces the start of a new process, that of playtesting and tuning the game, which
has now begun.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Rules of War.
I was racing to get this done by the bicentennial of the battle, but just missed. Anyway, there is no diary entry
here other than the second draft of the rules to Napoleon’s Triumph. What happened to
the first draft? Well, the first draft had no examples and had so many internal inconsistencies that I didn’t feel
like publishing it, even as part of the design diary. Still, this is a pretty big entry even without commentary, and
is the second major milestone in the design since the completion of the first version of the game board. There is much
of interest, but undoubtedly the main novelty here are the rules on attacks, which are both very similar to and very
different from those of Bonaparte at Marengo. You’ll understand what I mean by that
paradox when you read them. Also of interest is the fact that the game rules are in fact shorter than those of Bonaparte
at Marengo, thereby defying two expectations: (1) that any wargame sequel will have longer rules than its predecessor,
and (2) that big games must have long rules. Oh, yes...one more thing: I'm not providing customer support on draft
rules of an unpublished game, so while feedback is welcome, don’t expect that fast or personal responses will be
forthcoming.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Reinforcing Victory.
Two intertwined design issues in Napoleon’s Triumph have been victory conditions
and the burden of attack: which side has to attack in order to win, and which side has only to defend? The key
to this long-standing problem came from a surprising quarter: the rules for reinforcements. Also tackled in this
entry are two minor issues: the simulation of cossacks and (yet again) hidden units.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, The Scope of Things to Come.
A major problem in the design of Napoleon’s Triumph
has been setting the scope of the design. Scope, in this sense, refers chiefly to the limits of time and space
imposed on the design, the material implementation of which take the form of the map and the time track.
How these scope limits have been set in the game is the topic of this diary entry. Of particular interest is
the discussion of what scenarios are being included in the game and the rationales for their existence.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Secrets and Lies Redux.
One new feature originally intended for Napoleon’s Triumph which was not present in
Bonaparte at Marengo was to further limit the information each player had about the other’s
army. This entry traces the development of that aspect of the design from dummies through hidden groups and on to
the current implementation: hidden pieces. Of particular focus are the problems inherent in the introduction of
dummy pieces, and how the current hidden pieces implementation addresses the problems that dummies were supposed
to address, at a lower complexity cost and with fewer unwanted side effects.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, Follow the Leader.
The most important change in the design since the original conception of the game is the introduction of leader pieces.
Bonaparte at Marengo had a highly abstracted command system, but I had a desire to make command in Napoleon’s
Triumph less abstract and more concrete. The original conception was based on printing corps designations on the pieces.
The failure of this approach to yield the desired results led to the addition of leaders to the game. One of the important
benefits of this decision has been the overhaul of road movement, which has been abstracted to make it easier to
understand as well as yielding more realistic limitations on the ability of the armies in the battle to execute
complex maneuvers by road.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, The Road Not Taken.
This entry addresses a design direction that was taken back in June, which was not successful, and analyzes why
it was not successful. It also links back to a previously unpublished design diary entry from that period, at the time
when it was hoped that the June design would fix the problems with the previous version that had come out in
playtesting. As a bonus, this entry gives a sneak peak at a new version of the map, although an explanation of it will
have to wait for future design diary entries.
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Design Diary for Napoleon’s Triumph, The Sound of Silence.
It has been over 4 months since the last design diary entry; rather a long delay given
that the plan was for one or two entries a week. In that time, there have been numerous inquiries about the status
of the design, and those asking have received very little in the way of a response. This entry is my first real response
to what has (and hasn’t) been going on in all that time. The bad news is that not much has been going on; the good
news is that the project isn’t dead and may be seriously underway again at last. The entry is concerned with explaining
the design problems that have afflicted the project, and why it was stuck for so long.
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Bonaparte a Marengo regole del gioco .Thanks to the efforts of Maurizio Bignoli,
an Italian translation of the Bonaparte at Marengo rules of play are now available for
download. No other languages are being actively sought at this time, but if you’re interested in volunteering to
do a translation, contact as at
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馬 倫 哥 之 役 遊 戲 規 則. Thanks to the efforts of Lai Chi Wei,
a Chinese translation of the Bonaparte at Marengo rules of play are now available for
download. The Chinese translation has been available at the Board Game Geek website for some time, but it is now
being made available directly from here as well.
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Bonaparte bei Marengo: Spielregel. Thanks to the efforts of Richard Stubenvoll (the
designer of Friedrich), we have a major revision to the German translation of the rules for Bonaparte
at Marengo.
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Bonaparte at Marengo Ladder.
Dick Jarvinen is running a Bonaparte at Marengo PBEM (Play by E-Mail) ladder. For those who've never played in one,
a ladder is rather like a tournament that never ends, but which people can enter and leave at any time they wish. The
ladder is played as a series of rounds. In each round, the players are paired up to play based on their ranking,
which depends on their performance in prior rounds. If a player wins in a round, they rise in the rankings, and if they lose, they
fall. In each pairing, players bid for which side they want to play, with morale points as the currency of the bid (a bid
to play the French with a demoralization level of 15, for example, will beat a bid to play the French with a demoralization
level of 17). The games are played using the freeware program Cyberboard. Everyone who owns a copy of Bonaparte
at Marengo is invited to play. Downloads, rules, and contact information, are all available on the ladder website
here.
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