"Rebels and Patriots" for Napoleonics

While Napoleonics have always been the ur-toy soldier setting, they're traditionally associated with huge stands of lead figures being pushed around massive tables according to the dictates of encyclopedic rulebooks, and elaborate, hard-to-paint uniforms. But the increasing trend, as I understand it, in the toy soldier world is towards smaller games with more accessible mechanics, and Napoleonics haven't escaped this treatment. The imagery of the colourful uniforms, the rippling report of musketry, moustachioed cavalrymen waving sabers about, and thunderous cannonfire, regardless of how horrific the reality of it was for the poor unfortunates of the early nineteenth century, have a broad appeal, to myself included. As such, a long-term project of mine has been assembling and painting up 28mm Napoleonics, and to find a game that suited.

For a lot of people, that's Warlord Games' Black Powder. But having gone off Bolt Action when I realised that it wasn't terribly realistic, and seeing that it needs, as I understand it, quite large units, I've never played Black Power and don't know how it works. Online, certainly, the dominant rule set for Napoleonic warfare, and horse-and-musket tabletop gaming more generally, is TooFatLardies Sharp Practice, a set of "large skirmish" rules driven by leader activation. I like TooFatLardies rules in principle; I appreciate their devotion to giving a sense of period accuracy in games such as Sharp Practice and Chain of Command, and their adherence to the Clausewitzian principle of military friction. But as is often said online, their games have a so-called "steep learning curve", where a lot of their games' mechanics involve things like when to activate command abilities that enhance your troops, when to save them up, and small details that are often, I hate to say it, scattered across their rulebooks rather than being concentrated in the most logical places, at least to me. Combine that with an occasional tendency towards loose verbiage and I find Sharp Practice a bit more detailed than I really need, at least without the opportunity to learn it better and, regardless, a lack of any opponent at my club to play it against.

Another is Muskets and Tomahawks, probably the most significant rival to Sharp Practice, which has its own plethora of advocates and critics. I still find with this game, having only read the rulebook and with my first actual game forthcoming, that there's a lot to remember. And what I want most of all is to get the figures on the table, to start moving them around, and to roll some dice.

Enter Rebels and Patriots. I know this system, one of the many derivations of Dan Mersey's original Lion Rampant rules, has its detractors. It's seen as too simplistic, not detailed enough in its replication of the actual warfare of the period, and not good enough at differentiating troops with different technologies in different eras: a common complaint I see online is that it's not good enough at distinguishing breech-loaders from muzzle-loaders in the American Civil War and so on. Fortunately I don't play American Civil War, have no interest in the period and so couldn't care less if the rules don't represent the technology the way people think they should, but I understand the annoyance. Then again, there are arguably upgrades (or downgrades) to represent that.

Regardless, Rebels and Patriots presents itself as being a set of rules for (North) American conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries, beginning with the French and Indian War, arguably just a theater of the Seven Years' War, and ending with the American Civil War and Napoleon III's disastrous adventure in Mexico. Supposedly this was to avoid overlap with another Osprey wargame for small-scale Napoleonics, Chosen Men, which I don't know if anyone is still playing. Regardless, despite its insistence that it's a set of rules for American wargaming, Rebels and Patriots is very clearly just as usable for Napoleonic wargaming, and that's how I've been using it.

Rebels and Patriots has all the troop types you'd expect from any horse and musket era game: line infantry, light infantry, "shock infantry" (grenadiers, highlanders and the like), skirmishers, artillery, light cavalry (light dragoons, Civil War guys in big hats dual wielding revolvers from horseback, etc.), and "shock cavalry" (dragoons, cuirassiers, aggressively-deployed hussars, and so on). It also, of course, has "natives" to represent the indigenous inhabitants of North America during the period in question. However, with these troop types available it's perfectly useable for small Napoleonic battles. Here are a couple of lists I put together for a Peninsular War type game:

British

3 Line infantry (including leader)

1 Light infantry

1 Skirmishers who are sharpshooters (95th Riflemen)

French

3 Line infantry (including leader)

2 Veteran Skirmishers (Voltigeurs)

1 Shock infantry (Grenadiers)

The actions available to most units in Rebels and Patriots are what you'd expect: Move, Attack, Fire. Some units can Form Close Order to improve their attacking and firing, others can Skirmish to fire on the move. All activations are achieved on a 6+, unlike other Rampant games, but veterans, shock infantry and units within 12" of the leader all get +1 bonuses to activation, meaning that units that run off on their own are less likely to pass their activation tests than those that stay close to home, and also more likely to become disordered after taking fire or fighting up close, which seems fitting from my understanding of the period. Further, the "Form Close Order" action is an effective way of representing both a firing line and an assault column with a single rule; perhaps one thing that's missed is the ability for infantry to form a square. Another common criticism is that shooting is too powerful, which is a recurring critique of all the Rampant games, but this emphasises the importance, as was true at the time, of skirmish screens to shield infantry units from fire as they advanced. For earlier periods with cruder firearms you can always give everyone the "Poor Shooters" downgrade if your interpretation of the era is that shooting was less effective. One thing to note in this game is that charge distance is equal to the activation roll, so even a success won't guarantee an effective charge; charging at distances greater than 6" is fraught with risk. But, then, this still seems to fit the era, as Grenadiers advancing on formed Line Infantry may well find themselves in the position that the Imperial Guard did at Waterloo.

No rule set will please all comers for any historical period; the Napoleonic era is no exception. These rules are also critiqued in some quarters for, say, not making loading an action, or not having a test to see if units stand to when they're charged, but arguably all of that is incorporated into the abstraction of the game. If you want a fast, fun way of getting guys in shakos with muskets onto the table in reasonably small numbers I think you could do a lot worse than Rebels and Patriots. No, it's not going to give you the simulation-level experience of Sharp Practice. But that's not the point. The point is you can read the rules fairly quickly and have a game reasonably quickly, even if it is a bit of a "Hollywood history". If you need to house rule to suit your view of the era, that's okay. But it gave me a way to use my Napoleonic collection when I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the other options, and I think that's a good thing. I think if people are interested in starting Napoleonics, or historical wargaming more generally, the Rampant games are a better entry point than the commonly-cited alternatives.