From: Roberto Chiavini Subject: Friedland review Friedland (S&T 195) Sometimes to retrace our wargaming steps till the mid-Seventies and to dive in familiar waves can be refreshing. It's this the case with the new couple of Napoleon's Last Battles spawning from the guys at Decision Games and their rewriting of ancient wargaming history (masked as a reprinting of old SPI games they own the rights). In this short review we center our attention on one of these games, Friedland (the other half of the issue game, Borodino, will be analyzed in the future). Talking about the NLB system should be vain for every serious wargamer out there, so I'll spend only a few sentences on it. It's one of the grandfathers of all wargaming system, one of the better creations of Kevin Zucker: it's the usual IGO-YGO, with locking ZoCs, standard CRTs (with AR-DR-DE-AE-EX results), and a very primitive command and demoralization system, but it works very well and it's the better beer and pretzels system you may ever find on the market. Much of the fun of the game depends heavily on the situation you want to recreate: a few battles are very adaptable to this kind of rules, other not so. Friedland could be considered inside the chosen few. It's terribly fun to play even solo (perhaps especially so), as the Russian player is under a severe strain to try to beat both French columns before Napoleon and the other half of the French army reach the center of the field, while his commander in chief, Benningsen, can activate only two corps each turn; the French player, on the other hand, may stay more on the defensive, but could also try to reach Friedland and gaining a major victory before the end of the day. This makes for a very intense see-saw game of attack and counterattack, of feints and double envelopments, trying to reduce the strength of both sides without risking the skeleton of each army (the Guards) and hoping in the luck of the dice to hitting a decisive strike against your adversary. The game is fast enough (2/3 hours to play, no more than half an hour to read the rules and setting up the game) and it's a worth addition to every grognard library. I rate this game 7 out of 10.