Review: The Portable Napoleonic Wargame

THE Portable Napoleonic Wargame is the third in a series of Portable Wargame books by veteran wargamer Bob Cordery.
I have the previous two books, The Portable Wargame and Developing The Portable Wargame, and have gone through the latest offering twice.
I bought it direct from the publisher, Lulu, in paperback format for £10.98, which includes £2.99 shipping.

Attractive cover

The book has some 170 pages and contains FOUR sets of rules, although one set is more of historic interest, being a modification of Joseph Morschauser III's rules from his pioneering 1962 book How To Play War Games In Miniature.
Morschauser fought his battles on a gridded table-top using figures and scenery that emphasised the toy aspect of the hobby.
Cordery follows very much in this tradition, although he has greatly developed the concept, adding layers of realism without overly complicating what are genuinely quickplay rules.
The great advantage of using a grid is it massively speeds movement and firing calculations. The price for this is a reduction in flexibility, and the obtrusiveness of the grid markings.
Cordery gets around the latter problem to a large extent by using hexagonal terrain produced by Nottinghamshire-based Kallistra. The terrain looks fabulous and, while the hexagonal lines are clear, they are not so "in your face" as you might expect.
Hex terrain works really well for 20th-century and later wargames, but I am a lot less keen on it for games set in earlier times when straight lines were usually such an important feature of how armies formed. A square grid, as used by Morschauser, works better, in my view.
Cordery goes into some depth on the pros and cons of hexes and squares in his original The Portable Wargame book. He does not repeat that discussion but you can get a clear picture of the issues by studying the three battles reported in great detail in The Portable Napoleonic Wargame.
Why three battles? Well, in addition to the modified Morschauser rules, Cordery includes three sets of his rules to cover Brigade, Division and Big Battle engagements. The differences between the three sets are not mere tinkering but reflect the very real differences in the scales depicted.
Each set comes with its own battle report - Division on a squares battlefield, the other two on hexes. The battles include numerous black-and-white photos and a complete turn-by-turn account of what happened.
These reports get repetitive at times, especially as the language used is somewhat long-winded, eg there are far too many sentences like: "The 2nd US Light Dragoons rolled a D6 to resolve what happened and a D6 die roll score of 4 meant that the unit lost a further 1SP [strength point]."
This could easily be reduced to: "The 2nd US Light Dragoons rolled a 4 to resolve what happened, losing a further SP."
Cordery is also addicted to footnotes. The book has 178 of these, all of which could have been incorporated into the text without any interruption to the flow of the narrative.
But to an extent these criticisms could be seen as nit-picking as there is so much to commend.
Even if you are not particularly interested in the Napoleonic period you might find the book worthwhile just for its appendix on two command-and-control systems using playing cards. These are in a way stripped-down versions of Bob Jones' famous - infamous to some people - Piquet family of rules.
Cordery's original playing-card system was detailed in The Portable Wargame. I used it in my refights of the Battle of Chotusitz http://timspanton.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-battle-of-chotusitz.html and the Battle of Sahay http://timspanton.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-battle-of-sahay.html with mixed results.

Looking from behind the French lines at the Battle of Sahay

He now calls this The Random Method and has added a similar, but much less random, Turn-By-Turn Method, which he uses in the book for his Division battle. It seems to work well for engagements using a small number of units, but then so does the system of orders he adds to his Big Battle rules.
None of the three sets of rules is meant to be sacrosanct, and I can well imagine a user wanting to add flavouring, one way being by adding so-called national characteristics (for example, the rules make no difference between the musketry of a two-deep British line and a three-deep French one).
Will there be more Portable Wargame books? I certainly hope so, and the obvious next step would be The Portable Ancient Wargame.
If so, I hope Cordery takes a leaf out of Neil Thomas's marvellous Ancient & Medieval Wargaming book by showing how Portable Wargame rules can be used to refight historical battles.
But that is for the future - for now I heartily recommend The Portable Napoleonic Wargame and feel sure it will make for pleasant browsing for many years to come.