This is my collection of "glossy" rules. Actually I arranged them in order of favorites. I have several other but these are the "new wave" of glossy rules recently published. Perhaps catered towards me and my generation that was raised with a warhammer army on the book self and an army codex in our backpack.
1. General de Brigade.These are my favorite set of rules and our small group of players all like them. I bought the 2ed softback when I and my main opponent Erik decided to get a few boxes of 28mm plastic miniatures. We actually had a few games with Le feu Sacre before that with my collection of 1:72 miniatures about three years ago, but when we saw the new sets from Perry Miniatures and Victrix we dove in, and General de Brigade was the first set that came to mind when I went looking for a 1:20 "big battalion" set of rules.
Lately I have had an urge to play bigger battles and I somehow felt that we needed a simpler and faster set of rules. However now having tested Black Powder the other week I can't see us moving form GdeB, it's simply the rules we associate with the period.
Erik just bought a copy of his own and he is better then me at me when it comes to reading and remembering rules, so that has really brought up the pace we play.
2. Black Powder. A short and fun read. We played them once. I didn't have any particular gripe with them. My opponent found it a bit frustrating to learn a new set of rules. I can see a use for these rules when running a large multi player game. I will definitely buy any napoleonic supplements if published.
3. Lasalle. A really clean and well thought through set of rules. I like a lot of the concepts in this book, the army builder and no casualty removal amongst them. But I don't get why skirmishers is abstracted in a tactical game, and why units is restricted to four or six bases big, why not five? I wouldn't mind playing Lasalle, it's just that we already have a rules set that we like for this type of game, and why fix something that's not broken. I tried these in a solo game and had no trouble with them.
4. Warhammer Waterloo. I really wanted to like this book, and I did, until I tried to set up a game. There is so many weird rules, guess-range artillery, 4" infantry movement, 18" musketry range, a light infantry company can only take four hits while line infantry can take six? To bad, when I brought these to the club I really felt like there was an opportunity to bring a few of my warhammer buddies into napoleonics, familiar with the points build approach.
5. Napoleon.
I bought these for the eye candy and because they seemed like a set of rules a newbie could pick up and get into napoleonics with. The eye candy wasn't that good, have not read the rules. Browsing the Internet for reviews it seems like I shouldn't anyway.
