L'Arsenale del Nano: Et Sans Resultat!

Et Sans Resultat! The best grand tactical Napoleonic Ruleset I tried since a long time.

When I started wargaming here in Verona, we had neither a Napoleonic ruleset, nor adequate miniatures. That was quite peculiar, as the Napolenic Wars are one of the favourite periods for wargamers around the world.

After some years, I decided to start a Napoleonic project with Marco, the only other player interested in that era. After some checking on the Net for adequate rulesets, we found some interesting ones: we got a few, tried some, and will try more in the future.

We found the lack of a clearly dominant ruleset quite peculiar, thus we had to choose by ourselves what we wanted to pursuit. Some characteristics are mutually exclusive, such as the difference in focus between the tactical control and the “grand tactical” one: to achieve both seems to be beyond the possibiliy for any wargames, without becoming muddled in endless minutiae and almost impossible to play or enjoy.

So we split our search into two different fields: a “grand tactical” ruleset and a tactical one. During my search I found on TMP news about a recently published ruleset that piqued my interest, and I got the general impression that it was focused both on command and control and relatively “rules-light”. That was what I was searching, and I had to try it!

That game was Et Sans Resultat! (ESR from now on). Delivery required some time (the US is kinda far from my quaint little Verona, after all!). From the graphical standpoint, the book is a very pleasant view: it’s a full colour spiral book, nicely illustrated, with the rules clearly supported by examples. You could say I loved it already.

The cover of the rules, stunning artwork*

We tried it with the stock redoubtable cardboard stands – still lacking minis for the age, sadly!- and we liked it quite a bit: the rules gave us the “feel” of being a Corps commander in a Napoleonic epic, without having to worry too much about tactical nuances, or details like checking when a formation had to form square or line or whatever. I won’t focus particularly on the details of the ruleset here, as I’ll give a link to my own review of ESR at the bottom of this article.

No miniatures, for now

So we started buying and painting (very slowly, as usual) our miniatures: we picked French (of course), Austrians and Russians. The chosen period was approximately 1805-1809, because in those years there were some battles in our Northern Italy, as well as in the Central Europe.

In the meanwhile, the author of ESR, David M. Ensteness, who is very active on the social networks and on the Yahoo group about ESR, adressed many of the concerns and improved the rules by publishing an updated Second Edition. The graphics were even better, the rules clearer and simpler to grasp, with many unclear points explained more thoroughly, reducing the chance of different interpretations.

Last year we ran a demo game of ESR at Verona Model Expo. We have to thanks Stefano Bassetti, who borrowed us his huge (and awesomely painted, I may add!) 6 mm collection. We had a rather interesting scenario, loosingly based upon 1809 Bavarian Campaign.

Our demo game at 2016 Model Expo Verona.

Then others projects stumbled in, and real life tooks its toll, so our Napoleonic gaming and painting slowed down considerably. We still managed to try FOGN and we’re going trying GdB for the tactical level game (stay tuned on the blog for news about them!).

I also purchased the second campaign book published for ESR, “Roll up That Map”, focused on the year 1805 in Germany.

And so we get to the current day, and I’m proud to announce you I managed to publish my first article on a wargaming magazine. My review of ESR 2nd edition has been published on the last issue (January 2017 – number 63) of “Dadi e Piombo”. For the non-Italian readers, “Dadi e Piombo” (Dices and Lead, literally), is the only wargaming and miniature magazine currently published, once every 4 months, in Italy. It also organises two main events in our hobby conventions in our country: Milano Wargames and Dadi.com in San Marino.

Well, enough chatting, you can found my review here, both in Italian and in English:

http://thewargamingcompany.com/pdfs/Dadi-Piombo_Magazine_Review_in_English.pdf

http://thewargamingcompany.com/pdfs/Dadi-Piombo_Magazine_Review_in_Italian.pdf