Battles of Napoleon

Year 1989, the Cold War is in its final campaign outside and I'm sitting at a monitor with orange phosphor, dragging Napoleon across Europe with him. SSI had a golden touch for war strategy back then — just mention Gold Box or their wargame line — and Battles of Napoleon fits perfectly into this mosaic.

It's a turn-based strategy set in the Napoleonic Wars, so it hits the classics: Waterloo, Austerlitz, Borodino. You command armies on a hexagonal map, deploy infantry, cavalry, artillery and try to replicate — or rewrite — the historical battles of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. No grand campaign, no diplomacy. Pure tactical combat, neatly bounded by time and space.

The mechanics are what you'd expect from SSI in 1989: hex grid, unit point values, terrain matters, morale crumbles under fire. Mouse or keyboard controls worked acceptably even by those standards. The turn-based system gives you time to think, which is good — the map isn't small and a mistake in artillery placement will haunt you for three more turns. The AI is at the level of its time, nothing brilliant, but as a training ground for understanding Napoleonic tactics it's sufficient. Real tension comes in two-player hot-seat matches — that's where this type of game lived.

What Battles of Napoleon brought was an accessible treatment of the subject without unnecessary simulation pretension. Other wargames of that era would bury you in tables and manuals the thickness of a novel. This was comprehensible. Today the game suffers a bit from what almost every wargame of that time does — the visuals are stark to the point of abstraction and without the manual you'll quickly get lost in the unit icons. Sound was 1989 PC speaker, need I say more.

Who will it appeal to today? Mainly those interested in Napoleonic tactics and don't mind that the game looks no better than a chessboard drawn in Paint. It runs flawlessly in a browser through DOSBox emulators and an hour-long session of a single battle is exactly the format modern times allow. It's not the best wargame in SSI's library, but it's solid craftsmanship from a time when this company was truly kept alive by war strategy.