“I shall not spend my time dreaming away in inactivity while other brave men fight for the liberation of our German fatherland!”
Blücher puts the player in the role of an army commander in the Napoleonic Wars. It represents the most complete rethinking of grand-tactical gaming in decades.
Players do not set up predictable historical battles, where everybody knows the history, forces, terrain, and contestants. In Blücher, players set up campaigns. Each Blücher campaign places you at the start of operations for a few weeks in a famous hot-spot of the Napoleonic Wars. The Blücher campaign system is paperless. It uses card-play to keep track of things like orders, attrition, traffic, reconnaissance, weather, and even the progress of sieges or the actions of spies and politicians. Cards inject interesting “special events” into the the campaigns (What if Napoleon had arrived on the Danube earlier in 1809? What if the Prussians had allowed the Russians to cross their territory in 1805 and thus get into action sooner? Will your brilliant maneuver be spoiled by a sudden burst of bad weather?)
As units move from the campaign onto the miniatures table, they may or may not be revealed by reconnaissance. The campaign cards turn into miniature units as you create your own miniature battle through your campaign decisions and the acts of your opponent. No two games will be the same. Most importantly, the “set up time” that is so often a tedious ritual in many grand-tactical games is now a crucial part of the gameplay.
Blücher uses a flexible scale, adjusted as needed for different campaigns and theatres. Crucially, all Lasalle bases “work,” so that players can transition easily from one game to the other. No matter how big the campaign or battle, the game will scale to a reasonable amount of space and figures. Like all HONOUR games, Blücher plays in a few (2-4) hours on a reasonably-sized table with a reasonable collection of miniatures. But it is not simply “Lasalle’s Big Brother.” Blücher is a very different game.
Blücher is the second game in the HONOUR series. It is tentatively scheduled to appear in 2011.