Sometimes a game is designed that creates a new experience. Creates a new paradigm about what games can be and how they can help you experience a historical situation. A few years ago, I, Napoleon from GMT Games was announced and it was marketed as a historical role-playing game. Not with polyhedral dice, magic and dragons but more as a “choose your own adventure” style of game where you could make choices about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte as he made his way to infamy from his humble beginnings as an artillery officer, to staging a coup d’état in 1799 and becoming First Consul and then to dominating much of Europe and being crowned as Emperor of the French Empire. This was the promise of I, Napoleon and I was very much intrigued by the concept but more importantly about how this game planned to do just that.

As you probably know, normally Ted Raicer designs hard core hex and counter wargames such as The Dark Valley: East Front Campaign, 1941-45, The Dark Sands: War in North Africa, 1940-42 and The Dark Summer: Normandy ,1944. These games are fantastic experiences that are true wargames. But, he also has an eclectic side to him and has designed one of the classic card driven games on the subject of World War I in Paths of Glory. So when I heard that he was designing this interesting looking card based historical role-playing game the first thought that came to my mind was “How is he going to accomplish this feat?” And recently, I was finally able to get the game to the table for a few plays and I believe that he has mostly delivered on that promise.

I wrote a fairly in-depth First Impression style post on the game and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2024/10/16/first-impressions-i-napoleon-from-gmt-games/

We also published an interview with Ted on the blog and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2023/02/20/interview-with-ted-raicer-designer-of-i-napoleon-from-gmt-games/

-Grant