William Terdoslavich  - Mar 29, 2009 11:49 am (#27655 Total: 27800)  
I'm in print again--seven contributing chapters in "It Looked Good 
On Paper," edited by Bill Fawcett. 	 

As for Waterloo 20, it's a gem. Played out the whole game in 30-45
minutes. Won as Anglo-Prussian. 

This game has an elegant mechanic. Army morale permits play; once it
zeroes, you lose. Units are flipped over face down at any night turn
when not in contact with the enemy and a dummy counter or two is added
to get some "fog of war." Pieces were at the corps level. You were not
stuck wasting a lot of time trying to decide what to do with everything.
Factoring was kept simple. There are event cards, but they are there to
mix things up a bit. That increases replay value. 

the Morale track is the heart of the game. Sacrificing morale can give
you column shifts on the CRT or an extra MP if you are doing a forced
march. You gain morale for routing enemy units and lose morale when your
units get trashed. The player is forced to make serious decisions on how
to use this resource to best advantage. 

I think this system offers a lot of potential if you can re-scale
Napoleonic and ACW battles at the divisional scale, with morale
allocated per corps. It would mean playing an a far bigger map, like the
traditional 22x34 we see in many games. 

That would destroy the rationale of the VP 20 system--a cheap $20 game
with 20 pieces. (And I do like that rationale.) But I see some potential
here for a system that can be taken up to the next level. A fast-playing
simple game that forces you to make hard decisions is a worthy
touchstone in game design, and such games are fun to play. Players
should get some insight about the history of a battle if they can
experience just a taste of what commanders had to struggle with.

This game I bought. I'm looking forward to playing it again, and again,
and again.


Lance McMillan  - Mar 29, 2009 1:30 pm (#27658 Total: 27800)  

>...having your units die doesn't impact the army's morale.

Inaccurate -- if a unit 'Breaks' it lowers the owning player's morale by
1 and raises his opponent's morale by 1.

Morale is merely a resource to be expended.

But it's the decision behind when to expend that morale that's critical
-- both to maintaining the game's tension and maximizing your chances of
winning. There are so few opportunities to gain morale during the game
that using it, to force march or commit reserves, is invariably a tough
choice. Every morale point spent includes an element of "do I risk
putting myself that much closer to morale collapse and losing the game
in order gain a temporary tactical advantage now?"