I, Napoleon Review - RIB18

I, Napoleon Review

Disclaimer: I asked for and was provided a review copy of the game. I played it multiple times, until I felt that I had achieved the best ending, which to me is a mix of achieving 100 or more glory, having a legitimate son, and bringing peace to Europe all in one run.

TLDR: I, Napoleon is a very engaging solitaire game. The setup and playtime is long, so it is best played on one of those days where you have an evening to yourself and are free of responsibilities. It takes a bit to get the hang of but does a great job of making you feel like the man himself, with all the glory and tension that come with the role.

        I, Napoleon marks a professional achievement for me. It’s the first board/war game I’ve asked for a review copy of, and I made a good choice. I was nervous asking for it, but the individual who helped me out at GMT Games was very nice and the process was butter-smooth. I first learned about the game in a pretty round-about way. I’m very new to wargames as a hobby, my background is in the TTRPG sphere and so I was watching a video about this year’s GenCon when I saw a picture of this game pop up. The cover art drew me in immediately. The video was about multiple games, so I was doing a heuristic process where I would skip to the next game immediately after deciding if a game simply looked cool enough for me to investigate.

        This game obviously passed the test. It’s gorgeous, but it wasn’t until I got around to looking up those games that I learned what it was about. I, Napoleon is a solitaire experience, it’s grand, ambitious, and the board and pieces make for some real eye candy. As a game designer, I have studied more games than I have actually played, and so knowing that this was designed by Ted S. Raicer, who also designed Paths of Glory (which I’ve never played, but have heard of many times), only helped to pique my interest.

        I’ve played the game a few times at this point. It’s a very long process but once you get a solid grasp on the gameplay loop, things really pick up. I have very minor criticisms of the game, I think the biggest thing is that there’s a lot going on and it’s easy to be forgetful of what you need to do. I chewed on some of the rules for hours after playing to try and see how the designer meant for the game to be played, and I’ve seen videos of people playing on YouTube who also get some rules wrong. It’s a bit technical to talk about but it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. I’ll tell you as simply as I can, what chewed me up was considering whether the dice roll modifier track applied to all dice rolls or only those that are explicitly shown in the play/rulebooks.

        It sounds ridiculous, but I actually thought about it for a long time because I could come up with multiple arguments for a newcomer to interpret the rules from both sides. It’s really strange to talk about because my reviews are meant for people who are considering something instead of being already familiar with it, but suffice it to say that the conclusion I came to was that I was really overthinking it and that the dice roll modifier applies to all rolls.

        I was overthinking because the difficulty of the game is tied to the speed and presented as more dynamic than it seems to be in my experience. There was a lot in that sentence, I’ll try to break it down for you. Each turn you draw 5-12 cards, where for the sake of simplicity all you have to know is that rolling low on a d10 stops you from pulling more cards somewhere in that range (and if you hit 12, you stop regardless).

        In the end game, you’re going to be pulling a lot of cards that you either have no use for or that don’t apply to your situation, so rolling low earlier in the draw phase slows the game down considerably. But rolling low (and by extension, having a bad dice modifier), makes the early and mid game a lot more tense because you are really trying to beat the clock and build up a solid foundation for the end phase of the game.

        The dice roll modifier can be “set” in the early game, depending on the gambles you take. This changes the game extremely. Hell, in my victory run I had the maximum modifier bonus for the entire end game, which nearly trivialized it (although I got very lucky with my dice rolls as well by avoiding war for multiple years, which you can think of as levels or turns).

        So what’s my point here? Well, outside of the early game there aren’t really many instances where the dice modifier is changed in a static way (meaning outside of certain phases such as combat/campaigns and diplomacy rolls). I don’t really know how more dynamism would change the game. On the one hand the flavor of setting up momentum as a young Napoleon is there, and setting up well is actually really tough and rare, but on the other hand I sort of intuitively believe that if you exit the early game with a modifier of less than -1 or more than +2, the game becomes less fun.

        Allow me to briefly explain the game before moving on, it’s a lot so I won’t detail everything. Each round you are pulling cards, one at a time, some that you must place or play and others that are optional. These cards make up the bulk of changes for the resources you manage and before the end game they decide what fights you get into (in the end game this is decided by your relationship with other nations, and managing this is its own challenge). Combat takes place in campaigns, the outcomes of which are really the crux of how the endgame goes. It’s a really smart and immersive system.

        My other critique is with commanders, which are like your personnel which you can place on the board and then use in campaigns for a resource cost. It’s a fine system but there are too many commanders and not enough instances of removal or treason. I played full games retaining commanders from much earlier on the board, and because I knew the threat of treason was there, I would simply discard new commanders I drew. This made it so that somewhere along the way I would be drawing the full 12 possible cards per turn, regardless of rolls, just to eliminate some of the deck choices or because I was really drawing too many irrelevant cards (to clarify, due to the threat of treason I would discard the commanders that I drew, putting them back in the deck for the next year instead of placing them on the board).

        Another reason I did this, however, is because the cards themselves are quite glossy/thick. They don’t shuffle well without being sleeved, and so I would draw a lot of related cards or the same cards after attempting to shuffle large piles. I think this more than anything is informing my critiques above, so if you’re going to be picking this up, do yourself the favor of sleeving the cards.

        Going back to commanders, as I’m writing this I think that the problem is alleviated more in runs with worse luck, meaning a higher amount of campaigns with mediocre dice modifiers. I think that in an average or below average run, the commander issue is less present because you have a higher need for them, but to be fair this is sort of offset by how well you can manage the various resources you have in the game, which fundamentally is what it’s all about.

        I hope that the reader can pick up from the above that these issues are really quite slight, none of this stuff really impacts the core of the game. The game excels at making you feel like you are Napoleon. From a young commander to emperor, the choices you make and the intensity of the game scale really well and in ways that are quite unassuming. It’s a lot of fun, I really mean that. The late game portion is where things really begin, in my opinion, as this is where you have to manage diplomacy and hope beyond hope that you can escape the game without falling out of glory or meeting a dire fate.

        Losing in the late game may sound depressing but the game handles this very well. There are multiple positive outcomes you can meet, and I hope the reader will believe me when I say that the real fun of something like this is in the resource management and choices you make. Despite what I said about momentum earlier on, the end game (when you are Emperor) is really its own beast in most cases. It’s a riveting experience and I had a lot of fun with this game.

        I recommend this game to anyone who the aesthetic appeals to. That sounds odd, but I mean it. If it looks cool to you, then it’s well worth checking out. It’s not a game you can really play everyday, unfortunately. I would love to see a digital adaptation of this, but in the meantime it’s something that is relegated to those special rainy days where you have real quality time to yourself (the box art is all the more fitting for this, it really captures the tone of the game). I really like this game a lot. I do think it takes a bit to get the flow of things, but once you do it’s a very rewarding experience that doesn’t fall victim to simply being a historical narrative of Napoleon’s life. Your choices genuinely matter, and you should make the choice to add this to your shelf.

Nikhil Saxena

Founder, Destrier Studios

https://linktr.ee/destrierstudios