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Any one here play 15mm Napoleonic games? What is the most common game rules being used today?

I used to use General de Brigade (2nd edition) and Napoleon's Battles (2nd edition), both are fun but they are many years ago...

Any comments?

Lasalle for me, and then moving to Blucher when it comes out soon.

Generally the classics, tried LaSalle and really, really hated it. Hoping something good comes along soon.

Napoleon's Battles 3rd edition.

4th edition is supposed to be on the way, but seems to keep getting delayed.

I don't consider scale of miniatures and rules to have any real connection. The only issue is when something can't fit in a given frontage and even then, that's pretty rare. Like artillery in 40mm and 54mm.

Skirmish: Song of Drums & Shakos
Larger Skirmish: Sharp Practice
Tactical: Huzzah!, Elan Deluxe (both free), Black Powder, Lasalle
Grand Tactical: Republique, Fast Play Grande Armee (both free), Snappy Nappy and 2x2 Napoleonics (the last one is free as well).

The key is to ask yourself what the game looks like. Do you see brigades moving around with the individual disposition of battalions into different formations being beneath the notice of the command level of the rules? Or do you see yourself choosing when to deploy into square (or maybe rolling to see if they do it fast enough as a reaction). Do you see individual soldiers skirmishing with one another with a rifleman hoping to ram a ball fast enough to shoot a closing voltigeur?

Age of Eagles is the rules set I use. Based off of the Fire and Fury system.

 dracpanzer wrote:
Hoping something good comes along soon.

Blücher is out today.

Blucher Site wrote:The Blücher Rules
(PDF format)

$29.00

I guess if people are used to GW charging the same for their electronic books as their printed ones, that won't seem that bad.

I've been buying eBooks like crazy over the last year and find that 25-30% of a hardcover price is where most usually end up. This is almost 75%, which is way out of line with the rest of the industry.

Pen & Sword Publishing wrote:Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe 1815-1878 by Niel Thomas
Hardback £19.99
Kindle (12.2 MB) £4.99
ePub (9.5 MB) £4.99

Authors can price their books at whatever they want of course. And I won't buy them when they get out of line with the industry. Though luzme.com data shows the revenue maximizing point for ebooks in the US is $10. Perhaps as people will impulse buy at that point.

I was planning on buying the PDF for Blucher when it came out just to check it out, but at that price, the purchase is scuttled for sure.

To get back to the OP's question: There is no "most popular" set of rules for Napoleonics right now. In every scope there are multiple competing rules sets. While I think it would be cool if one set in each scope got sufficiently popular that you could reliably pick it up and find other people to play with in large urban centre, I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. I'm also a great advocate for the project based approach to historicals where you don't depend on the vagaries of the local community for your game of choice, but instead act as a host, providing figures, terrain and rules (perhaps also drinks or combining the gaming with a dinner party).

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I'm a little shocked by that PDF price myself. It seems a bit contemptuous of the digital market.

- - - - -

If Warlord has its way, the standard answer to OP's question in the next few years will be Black Powder.

 Manchu wrote:
I'm a little shocked by that PDF price myself. It seems a bit contemptuous of the digital market.

His pricing model appears to be "Hard cover? ebook? I get the same amount of money after expenses. I guess you can buy the ebook if you really want to..." I think to him PDFs are an afterthought that gets him a few percent more revenue rather than a sales channel he's actually interested in truly taking advantage of or supporting. I know he's often contemptuous of miniature gamers in general [EDIT: With good reason given some of the crap he's experienced online], so it wouldn't surprise me if he has similar feelings towards customers who want digital products.

If Warlord has its way, the standard answer to OP's question in the next few years will be Black Powder.

Warlord doesn't seem to do digital at all except where Osprey has offered ebooks. Like Sam Mustafa, they price their eBooks at a high price as well, around 60% of cover price. No electronic version of Black Powder though. Just the £30 hard cover.

That said, I do like the Warmaster-descendant approach the game has. The only issue I have is that it seems to require an unnecessarily large table and tons of figures to play at the normal size. I guess when you're in the business of selling injection moulded plastic miniatures, the more volume you can push, the better. And the game does work fine when you just scale down the base & table size, measurements and figure count to fit nicely on a 4x6 table. There are a few locals who play the game and that's what they do.

One thing I've noticed is that when it comes to Napoleonics, the rules that cost money rarely outperform the free options. DBN is a great fast play Napoleonic game, but The Unofficial Guide to DBA 2.2+ and the Humbersize Extensions which add the rules for Horse & Musket works great as a DBX type game. As does 2x2 Napoleonics. If you want something like Lasalle, then you have tons of free options. Huzzah! plays just as good, if not better. Fast Play Grande Armee is free if you want grand tactical, although I think Republique from War Times Journal is even better once you replace garish casaulty caps with nice casualty figures. All of Niel Thomas' rules are available for free from the AMW Yahoo Group if you don't want to buy his books (which are 90% period information and general wargaming information and the rules only take a few pages).

It's never really been a better time for "by gamers for gamers" type games for Napoleonics. One thing I have noticed though is that people tend not to value what they don't pay for. They'll buy a $50 rules set and sort of muddle through with it when a free option might work way better for them. I know a couple people who quit and sold off their Napoleonics part way through painting them because Black Powder just needed so many figures they never got around to actually playing. I think my 2x2 Napoleonics/DBHX armies have like 50 figures in them. I don't think they even looked for other options before they quit. The commercial product didn't work for them, so they just sold out of the era. After all, if the expensive high production value hard cover made by a professional game designer didn't do it for them, how could a free file of the internet possibly work?

I'm not sure that digital pricing/availability is all that important to the miniatures game market. We are a tactile bunch after all. As such, production values matter (not that Blücher is a particularly good example of that). As for folks quitting mid-army, that's hardly rare in any scale or genre. None of that's to say free rules are bad, of course.

 Manchu wrote:
I'm not sure that digital pricing/availability is all that important to the miniatures game market. We are a tactile bunch after all. As such, production values matter (not that Blücher is a particularly good example of that). As for folks quitting mid-army, that's hardly rare in any scale or genre. None of that's to say free rules are bad, of course.

I definitely agree. I also just find geeky people who play wargames are often tech savvy and have embraced ereading pretty readily. So many gamers I know have tablets now and love loading their gaming stuff on them for fast searching. I used to be one of those "I prefer books and will never want to read on a screen" type guys, so I get the tactile thing.

As for the people quitting, I think there's a useful feedback loop of collecting > painting > playing > collecting that increases both enjoyment and motivation and if you have a huge barrier to finishing the cycle even once in the form of a high model count, things may never get off the ground for a given gamer. A mismatch of gamer and rules set. And by the time they stop caring, they certainly won't care about looking for other options.

Same amount of design work goes into the rules whether its PDF or hard copy surely? You are paying for the authors work.

Only difference is the actual book and printing costs.

I dunno what the 'right' price is, but personally for me, I wouldnt make a book, and sell the PDF for anything other than the hard copy minus the cost of printing. After all the same amount of work went into it. Thats just my personal view on it, and I dont have PDFs to sell so maybe others have a different view but I always think PDFs are very cheap given the work to produce it was the same. I think perhaps as consumers we assume a cheaper price than it should be? Not my thing, love having real books.

As for Sam being contemptuous of gamers... must be a different Sam to the man I know. He has his own views, and sticks to them, but he always only tries to produce rules that people will enjoy to play. But im biased, I have had the benefit of chatting with him about gaming and other things and find him a very interesting gentleman, but then I also enjoy his unorthodox take on rules.

Just to say, im not defending his pricing or any other, just I do believe prices for PDFs are very low given the same work went into the product, and more in some cases. I dont see how any author would value their work so low. Maybe they get a maximum profit from it by selling directly? Cutting out other costs associated with hard copies.

Big P wrote:
Same amount of design work goes into the rules whether its PDF or hard copy surely? You are paying for the authors work.

Only difference is the actual book and printing costs.

I dunno what the 'right' price is, but personally for me, I wouldnt make a book, and sell the PDF for anything other than the hard copy minus the cost of printing.

The difference is that most of the ebook industry takes the distributor price. $8-10 per hardcover in a print run of 3000. Distributor price of $20 Retail of $40. Ebook $12 + maybe a 25-33% markup because it's such a niche product and you get $16. Which is the price Lasalle sold at in PDF upon release. I guess Sam figured out that when he raised the price to $20 his sales didn't really decline, so why not try $29? He should price the PDF at whatever price gives him the highest number from the equation Price x Units Sold = Revenue. And people who are into eBooks and are used to $10 or so can just pass it over if the price gives sticker shock like it did for me.

I don't blame Sam for his views of gamers. He's gotten himself into a game group where he's the only one who supplies painted miniatures and everyone else just expects him to do everything. I'd grow contemptuous of gamers if no one was ever stepping up and just expecting everything from me (and I say that as someone who approaches gaming as a project where I supply both sides for a game I'm interested in). And then add in that the vast majority of communication he gets about games are people telling him what's wrong with his games. Or having simple technical problems like not clicking on a download link and then sending him an angry email demanding the file. I've met the man myself as well and he deals with a ton of crap. I think it's had an impact. The sheer number of hours he's spent arguing on the internet makes my posting habits look like lurking.

I cant say I disagree with any of that dude... Sam sure did take some flak online.

 Manchu wrote:

 dracpanzer wrote:
Hoping something good comes along soon.

Blücher is out today.

Well, as much as I hated LaSalle, think I'll skip Blucher.

I got out of 15mm Napoleonic many years ago (a decision I later regretted) so I am not familiar with the popular rules nowadays.

That said, have you considered Field of Glory Napoleonics? The system has done well in Ancients.

What I would do is find out the base sizes for a number of rulesets and try to discover a good compromise or average size. Then you could prepare an army that would be broadly compatible.

I have heard very good things about Too Fat Lardies' 'Le Feu Sacre' rules, hope to give them a try some day!

Rules are only £7 for the downloaded PDF so worth a punt at that price I feel!

 dracpanzer wrote:
Generally the classics, tried LaSalle and really, really hated it. Hoping something good comes along soon.

If you don't mind me asking, why did you hate LaSalle? I haven't played it yet, but I have the rules and have read them, and I think they look quite good.