Vedette · Napoleonic Wars · 1798–1815

Exploring Officer

A Napoleonic scenario generator. Pick a theatre and a table; print the scenario.

Buy Exploring Officer · £15One file, yours to keep.

Early release — £15 while the next major update is still being built, then the price rises. Feedback: feedback@vedette-wargames.com.

TheatreGermany · 1813 Table12 × 6 ft Historicala battle, or none DistancesFeet

The controls, and the staff map they produce A staff map as the app draws it — the ground and its villages, the deployment zones, the objectives and what they score, the roads, a scale bar and a key. A different one for every scenario. The controls above are an illustration of the app.

Save the scenario and you have the finished battle — one file, plays offline, keeps forever. That’s what to send a friend or the club. Every scenario also carries a short code you can paste to rebuild it in your own copy of the app — handy on the night, but see how it works before you rely on it to match someone else’s game.

Any rules you like. Exploring Officer works with any set of Napoleonic wargames rules. A scenario is written in battalions, squadrons, guns, turns and inches — what every rule set uses and none owns — so it plays on your table with the rules already on it, whatever they are.

Not a mockup

One scenario the engine actually built

The map and the controls above are an illustration for this page. What follows is not. It is a scenario the app generated, unedited: a procedural battlefield with its own scale bar and legend; both orders of battle down to the battalion, graded; a balance calculation you can read line by line instead of taking on faith; objectives weighted by how much they matter; and an umpire’s note on how to run it. Set feet or inches in the app and every distance on the sheet follows.

Read the whole sheet

A generated scenario document: the title, the situation, and the staff map with its key and lettered zones — The generated sheet Title, situation, and the staff map: villages, woods, roads, the lettered deployment zones, objectives, a scale bar and a key. This is what prints.

The balance section: a tilt meter between the two sides, and the reasons for each of them in two columns — The balance, shown not hidden Who holds the edge and why, in words: the odds, the ground, the command. No index and no invented strength totals — you can argue with the reasoning rather than take a number on faith.

Both orders of battle, French and Allied, organised by division and brigade down to the battalion — Both orders of battle Division to brigade to battalion, quality graded, commanders named. Nothing left for you to go and research yourself.

Objectives with their point values and a keystone marker, and the victory bands spelled out in full — Objectives and victory, spelled out Points weighted by what the ground is worth, and the victory bands written out — nothing to argue about at the table when the last turn ends.

The reinforcement schedule, the deployment order, the special rules and the umpire’s note — Special rules, and why they are there Reinforcements, deployment, rules tied to this action rather than boilerplate, and an umpire’s note that says what the scenario is for.

The affairs of the nations

Europe redrawn, print by print

Between 1798 and 1815 the map of Europe was redrawn again and again, one broken kingdom at a time — and the print-sellers of the day sold the story as fast as it happened. One print mocks Napoleon baking a fresh batch of kings from the oven, Bavaria and Württemberg and Baden still warm, the broken ones swept into the ash-hole below. Another shows a woman climbing over her own side’s dead gunners to fire the last working cannon herself — loss, defiance and hope held in the same print, nothing invented. The scenarios stand on the same ground — the Peninsula of 1808, the Danube of 1809, Germany in 1813, the Hundred Days — and every sheet says which sources it stands on.

Gillray’s hand-coloured etching: Napoleon as a gingerbread baker drawing a tray of small kings from an oven — James Gillray · 23 January 1806 *Tiddy-Doll, the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings.* Hand-coloured etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Goya’s etching: a woman standing on fallen gunners to fire a cannon — Francisco de Goya · 1810 *Que valor!* — plate 7 of the Disasters of War. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The scenarios themselves

Cavalry against the squares

Look at the print below. The lancers go in at the gallop, one more charge into smoke that never clears — and in the same frame, feet away, a woman kneels over the wounded and the dead, an overturned caisson beside her. The words underneath aren’t a cheer. They’re a prayer: Bon Dieu, protège nos vieux débris — God, watch over what’s left of us. That’s not glory. That’s men worn past the end of themselves, going in anyway because there’s nothing left to do but go in. Pain and loss and a kind of hope, all in the same picture. It’s the same choice every scenario in this section hands a player, from the first turn.

Lithograph: French lancers charging past the dead and dying, with a battery of guns and infantry in square beyond, smoke filling the sky — Auguste Raffet · c. 1834 *Dernière charge des lanciers rouges, à Waterloo.* “Bon Dieu! protège nos vieux débris!!” Lithograph. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Lithograph: a mass of cuirassiers seen from behind, closing on a broken infantry square wreathed in smoke — Auguste Raffet · 1835 *Carré enfoncé.* Plate 9, “Album for 1835” (title as recorded). Lithograph. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Oil painting: Wellington on horseback among his staff, the battle continuing in the distance — Jan Willem Pieneman · 1824 *The Battle of Waterloo.* Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum.

Pen drawing: cavalry clashing on a battlefield, a mounted figure falling at the centre — Rijksmuseum · 1818 *Death of the Duke of Brunswick at Quatre-Bras, 1815.* Pen drawing.

Portrait miniature of Arthur Wellesley in a scarlet coat, about 1806 — John Wright · c. 1806–7 Arthur Wellesley, before the Peninsula. Watercolour on ivory. Cleveland Museum of Art.

What is in the box

Built from the sources, ready for the table

The historical battles carry orders of battle from the published returns and histories, with the sources named on the sheet — to the page, where the source has pages; a generated scenario is built to the period’s own establishment instead, since there is no return to cite for an action that did not happen. Where the record gives no figure the establishment supplies a standard one, so every unit plays. Deployment, objectives, victory conditions, special rules and umpire’s notes on the same sheet.

Thirteen battles are researched engagement by engagement — Austerlitz, Jena–Auerstedt, Eylau, Friedland, Fuentes de Oñoro, Salamanca, Borodino, Krasny, Leipzig, the Six Days, Waterloo and more — forty-four engagements between them, each a complete scenario with its own table, map and victory conditions.

Austerlitz runs to six of them on its own, including the Guard counter-attack: brigade-level forces, table-ready rosters at two table sizes, named commanders.

See a sample sheet