Vive L'Empereur! (2023)

Overview

Vive L'Empereur! is an exciting, solitaire wargame depicting the Battle of Waterloo fought on June 18, 1815. Controlling the French side as the Emperor Napoleon, you have conducted a brilliant campaign so far against not one, but two, Allied armies, defeating Field Marshal Blucher’s Prussians at Ligny and forcing the Anglo-Allied army under the Duke of Wellington to retreat from Quatre Bras. You have sent a wing of your army under Marshal Grouchy to keep the Prussians and the British-Dutch armies separate. Meanwhile, Wellington and his Dutch allies with 68,000 men have fallen back to a ridge line before the small town of Waterloo. On this rainy and muddy day, your 72,000-strong French army must defeat the Anglo-Allied Army before the Prussians can regroup, avoid Grouchy, and arrive on the battlefield at Waterloo. Are you up for the challenge?

Vive L’Empereur is a hex-and-counter war game that uses a chit-pull system to generate random force activations for both sides. The Anglo-Allied and Prussian forces (the forces of the solitaire side) move and conduct combat using random instructions from the game’s Activation Table.

—description from the publisher