When we last left Napoleon, Blown Apart, I made some changes to the two-player version of the game, and teased that the four-player version would be coming soon. Between the holidays and shifting to a new online platform for a prototype, it's taken longer than anticipated.

First, the new platform. I had been using playingcards.io, which I really do love. It's so easy to get things working with automations, it's a fantastic platform for getting a card game going quickly. I certainly had no trouble getting an expansion for a game of mine working on there quickly. However, I did run into a problem with PCIO for playtesting this game, which is that there doesn't appear to be a way to model the Reserve in it. It only has the notion of one hand per player, and there's no object you can place on the table that hides things from other players, because stuff on the table isn't owned. So, alas, it just wasn't going to work.

Time to find an alternative. You couldn't pay me to use Tabletop Simulator for anything, so that's out. I've used Tabletopia before, and the best thing I can say about it is that it's not TTS. However, I think anything with physics in it is just braindead for this kind of thing, resulting in a miserable playing experience. I had heard nice things about Screentop, so I decided to give it a try. Short version: it's pretty neat, and certainly can model the ownership stuff that I need. The documentation is pretty sparse, but I found my way through it. I'm not sure how to make it pretty yet or anything, but I think it's functional.

That sorted, it was time to actually get some updates for the four-player game in. I always knew it was going to be a partnership game, which is certainly appropriate given how many times during battles when there were multiple forces maneuvering on each side. What I wanted to capture was a little bit of action with your partner besides just trying to win tricks with them. There are a lot of little things from battles that I could evoke, but one thing I wanted to capture was some asymmetry between the side having Initiative and the side without. It would give some more texture to the game, further differentiating each Battle from one another.

The way I went about that was to permit the side with Initiative to perform a "pre-battle deployment", exchanging a couple of cards with each other. It allows them to adjust their hands, potentially giving them an advantage over their opponents to compensate for being behind. I did want the side without Initiative to also have something special, so they can "march to the guns", optionally sending cards to the first player on their side that plays an Artillery card. By deferring their card transfer until later in the hand, and making it one-way, it differentiates the two sides, which hopefully provides additional interest.

Finally, I added the notion of combined arms, which boosts both cards that a side played if they are from different suits. That's just a nod towards history, a vague gesture really, but it does provide for some surprises in play as well. When you combine that with the new bonus tokens, players should have more options during card play to tilt things in their direction.

Overall, though, the game should largely flow the same, and so the testing here will largely be around seeing if the three special rules work well or if they're just extra fiddliness without an additional befit. Draft rules are available, and there's a virtual test set for it on Screentop. If anybody tries it out, please let me know!