Hundred Days Campaign...

I've been doing some (further) prep work for a Portable Wargame Hundred Days' Campaign. In possession of a very fine campaign map from Columbia Games Napoleon, methought it would form a fine basis for a campaign map were it contained in a field of hexes. Now, I could have scanned a hex-field I have on file onto a transparency, then scanned the map with the transparency covering it.  I might do that yet. But in the meantime, I created this cartographical masterpiece:

My hand drawn map on a hex-field.  The thing is printed on a 
single A4 sheet. As someone suggested, I may be forced to create
game counters for this thing. 

The original seemed to have two classes of road, so I have outlined the 'better' class with black. I think this will work in the same way as my Kavkaz Campaign, that is to say, using the Portable Wargame campaign system outlined in the Portable Colonial Wargame.  

Having looked at the Hundred Days carried out by others (notably Murdock's Marauders and Blunders on the Danube blogs) the problem I run into is that it is hard to improve upon Emperor's opening strategy of the 'central position'! However, if I use Bob Cordery's card driven system, and the opening dispositions of the respective armies the thing might take some unexpected courses.

What I propose there is that if we assign the Allies the RED suits and the French the BLACK, we can further split the Allied suits:
♣, ♠ - French Moves - may be split between Right (Grouchy) and Left (Ney) wings
♥ - Prussian Moves
♦ - Anglo-Dutch Moves

My map with starting positions... just to show 
the concentration of the French Armee du Nord
against the dispersed Anglo-Prussian armies.

As there are quite a lot of formations involved - we might have to be a bit more generous with what may be activated per turn. 

The French (Napoleon) have the Imperial Guard - horse, foot and guns; five Army Corps, and four Cavalry Corps(unless the four are retained collectively under Marshal Grouchy);
The Prussians (Blucher) have four Army Corps;
The Anglo-Dutch (Wellington) have three Army Corps (one of these under Wellington's own hand), and one Cavalry Corps.  

Same pic - different angle.  Shows where the 
army commanders are (more or less)

We might have to take into account the possibility of detaching/re-attaching Division-sized formations from their parent Corps, although the form of the map seems to indicate that a Divisional level of formation is probably not appropriate.  

The Columbia Games Map with starting positions.
It's a really nice map.

Before closing, I will admit to placing this article here because this thing is what I've been thinking about lately. And that might well be due to my recent finishing off my Plastic Prussian army. A couple of mumfs back I bought a couple of Prussian-looking metal 12 figure cavalry units, thinking that my army was deficient in this arm. Turns out I was mistaken - discovering a whole bunch of unpainted plastic figures I didn't know I had. These were the horrible Italieri chappies, but, biting the bullet of  fear and loathing, I finally painted them up to an OK-ish standard, and now have SEVEN units - far more than this army needs. But, of course, no more than this army can use! I'm betting that, just to show me, these fellows will fight like demons...

I don't know when this campaign will get started. The Kavkaz Campaign must (of course) take priority.  And there's the vexed matter of the suspended Byzantiad saga to consider.

To be continued... some time.