Triomphe à Marengo
Originally a three part post on Cohost in August 2023, documenting my time with Rachel Simmons' masterpiece game Triomphe à Marengo.
Rachel Simmons' last game, and in a series I've read so many design notes about, is finally in my hands. I've never played a Napoleonic wargame, but since I read about this I knew I had to get a copy. Dramatically unique in so many respects, but not least it's a wargame without dice or hexes, and no other pieces besides the unit themselves.
God damn it looks so good!! I was not prepared for the production quality of this. It looks wonderful in person, it's all "graphic design" in a sense but does really become an artistic object.
Alright, I've played one game
and god damn. I don't really play wargames, nor Napoleonic games, but from what I've seen there really isn't anything like this (dear god if there is, please tell me immediately).
The first thing you realize about Triomphe à Marengo is the speed. A single turn of the eighteen can be over in minutes, though later turns are drawn out with the agony of how do I untie this knot and extricate myself from a horrible situation of my own making?
The next is how vicious and bloody it is. Combat will exact a toll on both sides, and you'll soon notice how small, fragile, and spread out your army is. Better to maneuver, take a flanking position, and stay flexible. But the inertia of your pieces is hard to overcome. At the start, the roads and fields are clear, you can progress to nearly anywhere. Once your two armies meet, the gears of men and horse grind together, and it's likely a unit won't move more than a hundred meters for the rest of the day. Where you fight takes on great importance.
Which leads me to perhaps my favorite system in this entire game, the morale. Morale is the standby 'soft health' of an army in a wargame but I've never seen it deployed like this. Morale stands in for your troops fighting spirit, of course, and increased through the time track as notable events happen during the day. But once units engage, morale is placed on the map itself, piling up as a result of combat. As the player and stand-in general, you can evaluate the map and terrain for chokepoints, quick exits, and flanking positions. Then, one wayward assault can suddenly leave half of your morale tokens exposed, and suddenly that single meaningless region becomes absolutely vital. If enemy units move in, the morale is lost, and soon the battle. It's lost because you fought for something and you lost it, even if the the thing itself didn't matter to begin with. Morale transforms from 'soft health' to a highly variable objective system, purely driven by the actions taken in that game. It truly does begin to actually represent the effects of combat and the impact the land has on the troops fighting there.
I got absolutely obliterated in my first game, but there is a near infinite depth here to explore and tease out. And for a game with very few pieces and almost no randomization at all, what else is there to say? A triumph.
Three Games In
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The Austrians finally achieve victory. Artillery bombardment (1) helps break the initial French holdout outside the village of Marengo, while a contingent of Austrian troops breaks for the road to Sale, to cross the objective line for a marginal victory (2). The French troops retreat from the village of Marengo quickly, and as reinforcements arrive gather a strong but diffuse force around San Giulano (3). If they can hold off the contingent Austrians and hold out until nightfall, they will win their marginal victory. Soon the contingent force is cut off, and the Austrians at Marengo regroup to close in to the forces holding Castelceriolo. With the day running out, and the French troops outnumbered and committed to their lines, the Austrians come in from behind and sweep them away, draining the remaining French morale in a decisive Austrian victory (4).
I feel like now, three games in, the full breadth and scope of the game has opened. Because of the lack of randomized skirmish outcomes, you can say with a certainty how many troops it will take to defend an approach into a locale (one side of the map's terrain polygons) for one assault. The deep and game-length uncertainty is, how many attacks will those troops need to actually defend from? You can certainly defend from one, and perhaps two, but almost never three or more. Does the enemy have artillery opposite you, allowing for one way attacks to weaken your whole strategy? Or cavalry to quickly drive in to a flank? It's honestly likely that approach will suffer no attacks, and the enemy is committing troops there to delay you and ensure those troops aren't better used elsewhere.
While this defensive position grows with uncertainty over time, the attacker has an immediate uncertainty - how strong are the troops on the defense? Can I take them in two assaults, or three? You can bombard them, but each side has exactly one artillery piece, making it's positioning crucial, and cavalry is not infinite. Each failed assault costs morale, which becomes a bigger bottleneck than the actual troops. You cannot relentlessly attack, so each assault becomes a calculation of where you can precisely punch a hole in a defense. This is such as simple and strong thematic link - of course your units will break long before everyone is actually dead.
I now have a solid plan of which troops should go where. I (as the Austrians) will bring my strongest units past the French held fields, and make for the objective line to claim marginal victory. My weaker ones will engage at Marengo and try to break the French early, which they did end up achieving. Every commitment has long ranging consequences, since units are so difficult to move. So many times I wished that I had just one extra cavalry unit here to sweep around a flank, or one strong infantry to assault a locale I knew was weakly held. Once a unit is on a road, it can move easily and usually for free. But to commit them to attacking or defending a locale starts to quickly use up your three command points per turn, and disengaging them to redeploy elsewhere is always expensive and time-consuming. You'll notice many of my troops at Marengo, including the priceless artillery, stayed put after that engagement because I simply didn't have the command to spare to get them back into the fight elsewhere.
This game has a strong chess-like feeling, in great ways. Your pieces are generally evenly matched, and when pieces can only act once on a turn, the inertia of a movement allows a fast defensive response. To successfully complete even a simple attack on an adequately defended position requires a coordination of multiple troops, across multiple turns. Artillery can only fire once every two turns. The fog of war is strong, and though pieces are frequently revealed the challenge is holding it all in your head. This third game though we did keep track of important pieces that revealed, basing future plans on their type and strengths. The defender's advantage is so strong it's overwhelming, which makes sense thematically. From the defender's point of view, any concerted effort can break a defense, if the enemy decides to commit enough time and manpower to it.
I'll wrap this up by saying I obviously love this game. There is such a depth of possibility, and expression of strategy and tactics that I look forward to exploring. I would also love (and might make myself) more maps to simulate other Napoleonic battles, with varying terrain and scenario specific morale rules. Even so, what a fantastic game.