As many of you know, General d’Armee (GdA) is a new
set of Napoleonic rules published just before summer by Reisswitz Press, the
sister company to TooFat ardies. The author, Dave Brown, is a well-known and experienced
wargame rules writer so I was expecting a good quality set, as it’s been the
case.
Although I bought the book the release day and
read thoroughly in my summer holiday break, I decided to refrain from
commenting in the blog until after I had tested on a gaming table and could
consider myself enough familiar with the system.
For that purpose, I gathered a small group of
players in my local club and have been extensively playing since late
September. GdA is not simple, on the contrary, the learning curve is fairly
steep at the beginning; but now I feel finally fairly confident and familiar
with the rules.
What is General d’Armee?
In GdA players seat in the saddle of a
commander of an army or division (in Napoleonic terminology): 5 to 8 brigades,
each composed of several regiments. The rules however can be stretched and
extended to play with a full Army Corps. So at least on paper, GdA is suited to
play medium to large battles.
However the basic manoeuvre unit is an infantry
battalion (300 to 1000+ men), cavalry squadrons and artillery batteries, representing
the building blocks of the regiments; and this is as we’ll see later one of my
main objections to the game.
General d’Armee is an old-school wargaming set;
the 100 pages manual is basically all rules, with some photos and a good number
of examples to illustrate or clarify the different topics. It is not designed
for a light reading; it’s full of details and as I said before, it requires a
fair investment of time in reading, annotating and playing with the book on the
side for consultation.
