Online Napoleonic Wargame Rules

I am not sure exactly when I wrote my current Napoleonic Wargame Rules, but it must have been about 2009, when I started my 1813 campaign.   Prior to doing so we were using Le Feu Sacre (LFS) rules, a commercial set which were very popular around that time.   As often happens when we use one set of rules a lot we find the weak points and start to write our own amendments.  Before long they bear only a passing resemblance to the original rules.

The new campaign rules were designed to provide multi corps battles using the figures already in my wargames army.   And the new wargame rules followed the same principle, but in addition would provide the fast moving and fun type of wargames which we enjoy.

I freely admit that the new wargame rules were derived from LFS, though they have changed considerably since then.    The great advantage of writing your own rules is that you know exactly what you want to achieve, so you can amend them without upsetting the overall balance of the rules.  And we have done this time and time again in the past seven years.

It was always my intention to record the progress of the campaign online using a blog format.   This was done to provide me with a permanent record of the campaign, rather than because I thought that there would be any great interest in the project.

The blog would contain a daily record of each campaign phase, plus a battle report of each wargame fought.   It therefore made sense to publish the rules in a separate blog.  

This proved particularly useful when I converted the solo campaign to PBEM.   Players could not only follow the progress of the campaign online, but would also have easy access to both the campaign and wargame rules.

Right from the start I used Amazing Counters.   They record every visit to each blog, but ignore any that I make.   They show daily, weekly and total visits from the start of the blog.

I don’t often look at them, but I did today.  I was truly staggered to find that there have been a total of 36493 hits.   Last week alone there were 53 hits.   This is despite the fact that the last amendment was posted on 25 June 2016!

This does not, of course, mean that more than thirty six thousand people have read the rules.  No doubt many individuals have visited many times.   But it does show an amazing amount of interest in a set of rules that were never designed to be read by anyone other than me.   Little attempt has been made to make them easily understood by anyone else.  There are really more a series of reference sheets rather than complete rules.

It is also quite surprising that despite the large number of visits I have only had four comments or questions.

As with most things connected with blogging the reason for so many visitors will remain a mystery.   I would love to think that my rules were being used on wargame tables throughout the world, but I rather doubt it.  

However I am pleased that so many have shown an interest and I hope that they may have prompted others to write their own rules.