Horse, Musket and Gun: Coming Full Circle

As a group, the Centurions have always been fascinated by the Napoleonic Wars. It is one of those periods that miniature wargamers seem destined to revisit time and again. The colorful uniforms, grand tactics, charismatic commanders, and sheer scale of the battles make it one of history's most compelling eras to recreate on the tabletop.

Over the years I have accumulated a few thousand Napoleonic figures.

And by "a few thousand," I mean somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand.

At some point, you stop counting individual figures and start counting armies.

For General de Brigade, I own enough French to field two corps at full paper strength, complete with the Imperial Guard and Reserve Cavalry suitable for a Waterloo campaign. Opposing them is an equally large British and Allied force.

For Rank and File at 1:30, I have another substantial collection in 25mm, including two Austrian corps from the 1813 campaign, the Austrian Reserve Corps, and a sizeable French army.

Then there is my collection for Napoleon's Battles, where one figure represents approximately 120 men. For the 1809 campaign, I own the entire Austrian Army.

And when I say the entire army, I mean the entire army.

Every infantry regiment, every cavalry regiment, every artillery battery... even the Kaiser's Bodyguard.

The irony is that after all these years, the miniatures have never been the problem.

The rules have.

Like many Napoleonic gamers, I have a handful of favorite rulesets.

I still believe Napoleon's Battles, particularly the First and Second Editions, remains one of the finest systems for fighting truly large engagements. The later editions never quite captured the same magic for me.

For convention games or introducing new players, I enjoy Rank and File. It is easy to teach, plays quickly, and lets players focus on commanding troops instead of studying charts.

Then there is General de Brigade. There is simply nothing quite like seeing those magnificent 36-figure French battalions deployed across the table. Few rules capture the visual spectacle of the Napoleonic battlefield so well.

The problem is that my favorite rules are not necessarily everyone else's favorite rules.

Over the years, the Centurions have examined at least a dozen different Napoleonic rulesets. Some were too detailed. Others were too abstract. Some worked wonderfully for two players but struggled with six or eight. Others demanded that players become experts in the rules before they could simply enjoy the game.

When you're designing games for a club, the question isn't, "What is the best Napoleonic ruleset?"

The question is, "What is the best ruleset for our group?"

It needs to be easy enough that a new player can sit down and enjoy themselves after a short explanation. It needs enough tactical depth that experienced players remain challenged. It needs to handle large multiplayer games without bogging down, and it needs to reward sound battlefield decisions rather than mastery of obscure rules.

That is a surprisingly difficult balance to find.

Back in 2004, I decided to stop looking.

Instead, I wrote my own rules.

I called them Horse, Musket and Gun.

The goal was never to reinvent Napoleonic gaming. I simply wanted a set of rules that reflected how the Centurions enjoyed playing: brigade and divisional commanders making meaningful decisions, large battles that could be completed in an afternoon, and mechanics that stayed out of the players' way.

For a while, it looked promising.

The rules went through several revisions and numerous playtests. Then one of the playtesters discovered a significant flaw in one of the core mechanics. It wasn't a minor balance issue or a poorly worded rule. It exposed a weakness in the command system itself.

Correcting it required more than a simple errata.

It required redesigning the game from the ground up.

Like so many hobby projects, life intervened. Other historical periods caught our attention. Other rules demanded our time. Horse, Musket and Gun was quietly set aside, where it remained for more than fifteen years.

But the idea never really disappeared.

Every Napoleonic game I played over the next two decades became another playtest in disguise. Every ruleset taught me something. Some mechanics were worth borrowing. Others demonstrated exactly what I wanted to avoid.

Slowly, without realizing it, I had been rewriting the game in my head.

Now the Centurions are embarking on a new 10mm Napoleonic project, and it feels like the right time to dust off that old manuscript.

This isn't a revision.

It's a complete reimagining.

The original philosophy remains the same—put players in the role of brigade commanders, keep the focus on battlefield decisions, and make the rules support the game rather than dominate it—but everything else is open to reconsideration.

Twenty years of gaming experience, countless battles, and more Napoleonic rules than I can reasonably remember have all influenced this new version.

I'm still not trying to write the perfect Napoleonic rules.

There probably isn't such a thing.

I'm trying to write the rules that work for our club, our style of gaming, and our collection of miniatures.

Perhaps after all these years, Horse, Musket and Gun will finally become the game I set out to write back in 2004.

If nothing else, it's time to find out.

The game and campaign that never was.

For a little more than two weeks, I found myself in an enjoyable discussion with what I believed was a group of gamers about designing a Dark Ages campaign set in England around 1000 CE. We talked about armies, scenarios, campaign mechanics, and how the period could be brought to life on the tabletop.

I wasn't entirely surprised when the emails suddenly started bouncing from all three accounts. I'd begun to suspect that my "group" of correspondents was actually one person using multiple email addresses to create the impression of a larger conversation.

That was disappointing—not because of the deception, but because the discussion itself had been genuinely interesting. It was the kind of back-and-forth brainstorming that often sparks new ideas, and I was sorry to see it end.

The funny thing is, the conversation never really ended.

It simply moved from my inbox into my notebook.

For days afterward I kept turning the ideas over in my head, asking myself not just how would you game England around the year 1000?, but what kind of campaign would keep players coming back month after month?

The first question was the rules.

I enjoy Lion Rampant and SAGA for different reasons. SAGA captures the flavor of the period wonderfully, but I don't think it's the right fit for the Centurions. We simply don't play a given period often enough for everyone to become comfortable with the battle boards, and as the number of players grows, SAGA begins to lose some of what makes it special.

Instead, I kept coming back to Lion Rampant Second Edition. Our group already has experience with its close cousin, The Men Who Would Be Kings, which we've successfully adapted for both the American War of Independence and the French and Indian War, and are considering for a future colonial project. Lion Rampant shares the same design philosophy: straightforward mechanics, quick games, and enough tactical decisions to keep players engaged without burying them in complexity.

With the rules largely settled, the bigger challenge became the campaign itself.

I considered all the usual approaches. A traditional map campaign. A branching tree campaign. Even an operational system where armies marched from territory to territory.

None of them felt quite right.

Then I realized I wasn't really looking for a traditional wargame campaign at all.

I was looking for something that felt more like the old Legend of the Five Rings Collectible Card Game.

Each player would begin the campaign with a Stronghold—either a fortified burh or a castle, depending on the faction—and four surrounding provinces. Rather than every province being identical, each would develop its own character through a mixture of randomly generated and player-selected improvements.

Perhaps one province contains fertile farmland that can support larger levies. Another develops into a prosperous market town, increasing a lord's wealth. A monastery may provide learned scribes or political influence, while an iron mine might improve the quality of weapons available to local troops. Some provinces might contain ancient Roman roads that speed movement, while others are dense forests that favor ambushes and local defenders.

The idea is that no two kingdoms would evolve in exactly the same way.

Players wouldn't simply be maneuvering armies across a map. They would be developing realms, making long-term decisions about where to invest resources, which borders to secure, and when to risk everything on a military campaign.

In other words, the campaign itself would become as interesting as the battles.

And perhaps that's the most unexpected outcome of all.

An email conversation that may never have been entirely genuine still managed to produce a very real idea. Sometimes inspiration comes from the people you meet. Sometimes it comes from the questions they ask.

Either way, I'm beginning to think England in 1000 CE deserves another look. It may just become the Centurions' next great campaign.