“Gentlemen, examine this ground carefully, it is going to be a battlefield; you will have a part to play upon it.”
The above statement was made by <PERSON> to a group of his officers on November 21, 1805. Indeed, in eleven days time the Battle of Austerlitz was fought on that very ground.
It’s an axiom of war that once the first shot is fired, all battle plans go out the window. Not so with Austerlitz. More than just plan the battle, <PERSON> actually orchestrated and honed it down to the very last detail. That is not to say that the actual battle went without a hitch or a glitch. But when hiccups in <PERSON>’s plan did occur he was able to compensate; that was because he always gave chance or accidents a mathematical equation in his plans. <PERSON> had a genius for war and in 1805 he was at the height of his power.
Could the Allies have won at Austerlitz? Nothing is impossible but it was highly unlikely. The Allies acted precisely as <PERSON> wanted because he set it up that way. <PERSON> felt confident of victory before the first shot was even fired. He feigned weakness, played to Czar <PERSON>’s over-confidence and lured his opponent into the trap he had so carefully and meticulously set.
For this reason I’ve always enjoyed reading and studying the battle but rarely enjoyed gaming it although looking back, I find that I have owned five different games on the battle and that’s not all of them by even half! Back in 2012 there was a thread asking if Austerlitz was ‘ungameable’ (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/8180197#8180197) With more than a dozen games on the subject, Austerlitz is hardly ungameable. But it is a hard battle to simulate without hamstringing the Allied player into doing something stupid. The alternative is to let both players setup wherever they want. Of course then it really isn’t the Battle of Austerlitz.
It was that thread that sparked a slight interest in me to revisit the battle. I already owned 3W’s Napoleon at Austerlitzand I played it and wrote a review (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/808444/is-austerlitz-ung...) . Then when I did a geeklist comparing game ratings of 126 games from 1982 vs. 92
2012 (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/145706/wargame-ratings...) I saw an Austerlitz game I had owned in 1980 and I was surprised by how far its popularity had dropped in 30 years. I didn’t really remember much about the game so I picked up a copy on eBay and that brings us to this review.
Designed by the late <PERSON>, The Battle of Austerlitz was one of SPI’s capsule games. As a side note, in his article “A Farewell to Hexes”, chronicling SPI’s demise, former SPI designer <PERSON> wrote: Another failing was inadequate attention to financial details. New management discovered that SPI's highly successful line of Capsule games -- small, limited-component products sold for $6 -- actually lost money. Given distributor discounts, $6 would about cover the cost of shipping blank, white boxes without games inside them. The Capsule games had sold very well -- and SPI lost money on every one it sold.
The capsule games were a ‘shoehorn’ design. An 11”x17” legal sized map, 100 counters and an 8 page rulebook. Instead of form following function, the designer had to cram the function into the form of the restrictive components. That’s not to say that the games were automatically bad; on the contrary, some were very good. But some did suffer from the restrictions.
Graphically, I like the game. The small map is colorful and easy to look at and the terrain is easy to decipher. It has been skewered to fit the 11”x17” size so the orientation of the battlefield isn’t instantly recognizable. The counters are the same style SPI used in and every subsequent SPI Napoleonic game. It’s a style I like because even at a distance, it’s easy to recognize the type of the unit.
The opening set-up before the 13 French reserve units are placed on the map. Notice the French reserve line.
The Battle of Austerlitz is what I call a Little-Big Game. 92