Four answers to a battle nobody can win

Another Compare-Contrast article using  Mpa& Counters blog, all teh goodold magazines from back in teh day and my playthru. Every quotation was read; sources are listed at the foot.  .

On 14 October 1806 Napoleon invaded Saxony against a Prussian army fifty years out of date was trained for set-piece battles and sieges, not for campaigns of manoeuvre. The Prussians split their force. Napoleon beat Hohenlohe at Jena while Davout, with a single corps, met the larger half at Auerstädt and beat that too.

Underneath the manoeuvre there is a narrower failure, and Todd Fisher names it in one sentence:

“Not believing in a strongpoint doctrine that would have allowed them to anchor in a village, the Prussians were left with no other option but to fall back and realign.”

An army that cannot hold ground can only stand in the open, or walk backwards. That is the Prussian problem.

It is also a design problemor challenge to be met, and it has been handed to four different people. Two of them were designers. Two of them were reviewers reading the same designer. The fourth answer arrived on my own table thirty years later, from a designer who was not asked the question at all. 😊

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One — Thomas Walczyk, 1975: admit it, then offer a way out

SPI’s JENA-AUERSTADT: The Battle for Prussia, 14 October 1806 is a folio game on the Napoleon at Waterloo system. Division and brigade counters, 500 metres to the hex, an hour to the turn, twelve turns, two to three hours to play. Below-average complexity. A hundred counters and no dice — the folios shipped random-number chits instead.

The system is deliberately forgiving. Joe, writing on Map and Counters, describes a “relatively ‘bloodless’ odds-differential type Combat Results Table” in which the attacker “may, prior to resolving a battle, voluntarily reduce his combat odds in order to reduce or eliminate the chance of an unwelcome exchange.” Zones of control are rigid and sticky. Supply is automatic.

And in the historical scenario, Walczyk simply concedes the point. Joe:

“In the Historical Scenario, the Prussians have virtually no chance of defeating the powerful French forces converging on Jena; the clash at Auerstadt, on the other hand, can very easily turn into a French battlefield disaster.”

So the game admits its own battle is not a contest — and then hands the player an exit. The What If? scenario lets the Prussian

“ignore the choices of his historical counterparts and, instead, to mass his entire army at Jena in order to fight a single great battle of annihilation against the slowly-concentrating French.”

That is the first answer, and it is the honest one: the historical battle is not a game, so here is a different battle. The Prussian problem is not solved. It is stepped around, by giving the player permission to be a better general than Hohenlohe.

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Two — Ed Wimble, 1996: make it a rule

Clash of Arms’ JÉNA! takes the opposite view. Operational scale, 1,000 metres to the hex, two hours to the turn, three maps, 420 counters, a 28-page rulebook, $44. Six scenarios, from Saalfeld to an eight-day campaign.

Wimble does not offer an escape hatch. He writes the asymmetry into the recovery system. John Kisner, reviewing it for The General:

“Demoralization affects the two sides differently. For France, its consequences are trifling: the corps becomes a little harder to activate each turn but otherwise fights on normally. The effect is much heavier on a Prussian corps or division: all its remaining brigades and battalions disappear from the map.”

And the mechanism underneath:

“designer Ed Wimble has linked geography to the ability to recover lost combat steps.”

Rivers divide the map into reorganisation zones; a demoralised corps can only recover in a “pure” zone, and a single enemy unit pollutes an entire zone. Losses are not permanent units reform from a surviving cadre so the French player, in Kisner’s account, “sometimes questions the point of fighting: the enemy formations swarm back almost as fast as he kills them.”

Both armies bleed. Only one of them can find somewhere quiet to stop bleeding. That is Fisher’s sentence, expressed as a recovery table.

Kisner’s verdict:

“Ed Wimble earns his marshal’s baton with this masterful creation, a delight for both eye and mind.”

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Three — the same game, thirteen years later

Joe reviewed JÉNA! in 2009. He never mentions the demoralization rules in the terms Kisner used. He arrives at the same place from the victory conditions:

“The Prussian player can win in JÉNA!, but not if he attempts to fight on Napoleon’s terms. That is the central challenge posed by the game: Napoleon wants to maneuver against his enemy’s communications and flanks, and attack when his enemy is disorganized and vulnerable; the Prussians, on the other hand, want only to fight.”

Two reviewers, thirteen years apart, one reading the combat results and the other reading the win conditions, and both land on the same thing: the Prussian player must refuse the battle his historical counterpart insisted on having.

That convergence is the strongest evidence in this piece that Wimble’s asymmetry is not a quirk. It is legible from two different directions.

Joe’s caution is worth keeping too to wiit; “JÉNA! is probably not a good choice for the casual gamer” — because the price of developing the problem rather than stepping around it is that the game gets harder to learn. Walczyk’s answer plays in three hours. Wimble’s runs from six to sixty.

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Four — the table, 2026

Legion’s Trois Batailles en Allemagne, VIE system, Scenario 1. Nobody designed this one as an answer to the Prussian problem. It showed up anyway, twice in the first hour.

The French assault Lützeroda in column, not line — and the system rewards it. Column carries +1 to melee when attacking; line carries nothing. Against a town both take −2. So the mechanically correct formation is the packed one, and the series rules say so outright: “For infantry, column formation is ideal for melee.” The fog made it cheap as Prussian defensive fire generated nothing at three hexes — but the +1 is why the column went in as a column.

Then, minutes later, in my own session notes:

“One detachment forms a square, they other cannot make that choice given the Fr column closing on its flank.”

Prussian infantry in the open, with the protective formation unavailable to it because a French column already has the flank. No demoralization table. No scenario option. Just terrain, timing, and a doctrine with nothing to anchor on.

Fisher’s sentence, arrived at by accident.

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What the four answers add up to

.	Answer to the Prussian problem
Walczyk, 1975	Concede it, and offer a What If? where the Prussians concentrate
Wimble, 1996	Encode it — asymmetric demoralization tied to geography
Kisner & Joe, reading Wimble	Read it as the design’s core, from two different directions
VIE, 202-play date	Produce it without designing for it

A designer can step around a historical failure, build it into the rules, or model the period closely enough that the failure appears on its own. Three routes to the same place, across fifty years of the hobby.

Which is the argument for playing the thing rather than reading about it. Walczyk tells you the Prussians can’t win. Wimble makes you feel it in the recovery phase. But the moment it actually meant something to me was watching a detachment stand in the open because the formation it needed was not available or beneficial to them.

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Sources

Fisher on Prussian doctrine	p. 58, via Wiki/battles/jena-1806.md
SPI Jena-Auerstadt (1975), Thomas Walczyk	Joe, Map and Counters, 2011-04 — mapandcounters-blog/posts/SPI/2011-04-spi-jena-auerstadt-1975.md
Clash of Arms JÉNA! (1996), Ed Wimble — review	John Kisner, The General Vol. 31 No. 5, pp. 11–13
Clash of Arms JÉNA! — analysis	Joe, Map and Counters, 2009-06 — mapandcounters-blog/posts/2009-06-coag-jena-1996.md
VIE column melee modifier	series rules IV.2 and VIII, via Jena_Article_INTRO_DRAFT.md
The session	Published/Legion_Games/trois_bateilles-allemange/AAR_0600-0700_SHOTLIST.md