Peninsular War Battles 12+

I've been interested in Napoleonic warfare and played board games since I was in high school. I downloaded this game and at first it didn't really impress me much, but as I have played it more, I realize this game has a lot of great features that are subtle and if you just randomly play the game you might not appreciate how much is going on in this game. The differences in formations really make a difference as do troop quality and morale. I am not going to pretend that I fully understand all that is going on there but when I see a unit in line break and run from a cavalry charge I realize that there is a good deal to appreciate in this game. There are certainly things that could be done to improve the game. One of those is that I would propose it would be more realistic if every unit that engages in melee were disorganized after the fact. This is particularly true of cavalry. They do not seem to "feel" the ill effects of engaging in melee after a charge. They should probably require a turn or two to reorganize. Secondly units should probably rout/disorganize more if as they lose troop strength. Also it would be nice if there was a way to create your own scenarios. And of course it would be gret if you could play another human, but overall, two big thumbs up for these Napoleonic era games. Please make more!!

As another reviewer noted, this game plays a lot like the old miniature-based game system, Empire. I too am an old gamer familiar with that system, and the other reviewer is correct, there are several similarities to the former. A few more historical additions such as desultory cavalry, negative charisma, and nationalistic battle tactics would be interesting additions. Even so, this is a good and entertaining game in its own right.

I’m just going to be honest, while I like the visuals and the units look neat, the gameplay past the first main campaign (I don’t consider Invasion to be a demo campaign) just falls short of being bearable. Of the four campaigns played, all of them had at least one mission that was unplayable for either side, and the worst offender was Terror for the Allies. I found myself losing interest in continuing the campaign purely because of poor balancing or the game deciding it wants to cheat it’s way to victory.

The base game was fine, and so was the bonus mission, but until the developers actually decide to go back and fix some of the balancing issues for the other campaigns, I simply cannot recommend this game in any capacity.

Please, fix your game Devs, I know you can do better because your other titles aren’t anywhere near as frustrating to play as this one was…