There is a date that every student of military history carries somewhere at the back of the mind. June 18, 1815. A ridge in Belgium, a summer storm the night before, mud that delayed the French guns by three hours, and by evening a military system that had dominated an entire continent for twenty years had ceased to exist. The Battle of Waterloo is the most written-about engagement in the history of warfare. It has been refought on tabletops and in seminar rooms ever since the smoke cleared. And still the arguments go on.
The reason is not that the outcome was inevitable. It was not. Napoleon's plan on the morning of June 18 was coherent, his army was experienced, and Wellington's position was anything but secure. The reason Waterloo remains endlessly compelling - historically and on the tabletop - is that the battle was decided by a sequence of events, each of which could have gone differently, and each of which can be replicated, reversed, or rewritten by any wargamer willing to take command.
What made Waterloo different from every other Napoleonic battle was what it ended. Not just a campaign, not just a hundred days of Napoleon's return from Elba, but an entire way of making war. The corps d'armée, the tirailleurs, the grande batterie, the Imperial Guard kept in reserve as the coup de grâce - these were the instruments of a military system that had reshaped Europe since 1805. They were all present on June 18. What was missing was the margin that Napoleon's genius had always provided, and by 1815 that margin had been spent.
This is the argument that makes Waterloo worth fighting again. Not who won, but why a system that had won so often finally ran out of answers.
WoFun Games offers the full cast for that argument. Peter Dennis's 10mm Waterloo collection - an extension of the broader 10mm Napoleonic range - covers all five armies present on June 18: French (in the new 1815 uniforms), English, Prussian, Belgian, and Dutch. Five national contingents, each with distinct uniforms and tactical roles, all illustrated with Peter Dennis's characteristic precision and deployed on a 90cm x 120cm mat where the full width of the battle becomes playable. At 10mm, Waterloo fits on a table. That matters, because Waterloo is a battle that can only be understood at scale.
The System That Won Europe
To understand why Waterloo ended the Napoleonic era, it helps to understand why the Napoleonic era had lasted as long as it did.
From Austerlitz in 1805 to Dresden in 1813, the French military system delivered victories that seemed to violate the basic logic of warfare. Opponents with larger armies, better supply lines, and more defensible terrain were outmanoeuvred, isolated, and destroyed in detail. The mechanism was the corps d'armée - each corps a self-contained army, capable of living off the land, marching independently, and fighting alone for a day until reinforced. It allowed Napoleon to concentrate force at a decisive point faster than any opponent organised along conventional lines.
The infantry tactics reinforced that advantage. Tirailleurs - light infantry skirmishers - preceded every column, forcing the enemy to deploy and absorb fire before the main assault arrived. Massed artillery, the grande batterie, opened every major engagement by concentrating guns at the chosen point of attack until the defences were degraded. Then the columns came through.
And in reserve, untouched until the moment Napoleon judged the enemy was broken, waited the Imperial Guard.
By 1815, every element of that system was present but strained. Soult, a competent general but no administrator, had replaced the irreplaceable Berthier as chief of staff. Ney, commanding the left wing, fumbled the critical coordination between Ligny and Quatre Bras, allowing Wellington to withdraw intact. Grouchy, given the right wing and a third of the army, marched east after the Prussians and never came back. The Armée du Nord that deployed on the morning of June 18 was veteran, willing, and pulled in three directions at once.
At the heart of that army - and at the heart of Peter Dennis's collection - stood the Guard. The Imperial Guard Fusiliers and Imperial Guard Fusilier Chasseurs represent the Guard's Middle Infantry battalions, the experienced regiments who had marched in every major campaign since 1805 and remained unbroken by a single defeat. Each sprue, cut from 1.5mm Plexiglass and pressed into 43x43mm MDF bases, carries the distinctive 1815 campaign uniform: the dark blue coat, the bearskin replaced by the shako in these middle formations, the bearing of men who knew precisely what they were expected to do and had always done it. Supporting them, the Imperial Guard Horse Artillery & Allied Horse Artillery places 48 gunners and limber crews on a single sprue - the Guard's own mobile artillery, which could reposition at a gallop to wherever Napoleon needed weight of fire. On the morning of June 18, they were the finest combined-arms force in Europe. The question was whether the system around them could hold together long enough for them to matter.
Wellington's Ridge
Wellington chose his ground carefully. He had identified the ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean before the campaign began, noted it in correspondence, and placed it in his mental inventory of positions that might be useful. When the French drove his army back from Quatre Bras on June 17, the ridge was where he went.
It was not spectacular terrain. A gentle forward slope dropping away south toward the French positions. A sunken lane running west along the crest. Three farmhouses - Hougoumont to the west, La Haie Sainte in the center, Papelotte to the east - fortified and garrisoned as forward anchors. What the ridge offered Wellington was what he had always preferred: the ability to conceal his reserve strength from enemy observation, a downward slope that shortened French approach distances while lengthening the killing time for his musketry, and the option to fight a defensive battle in which the attacker had to come to him.
What Wellington had less of was the army he wanted. The Peninsular veterans were mostly in North America or disbanded. Seventy percent of the infantry on that ridge on June 18 was not British, and much of it was untested - Dutch-Belgian conscripts, Hanoverian militia battalions, Nassau contingents that had been fighting for Napoleon until the previous year. The cavalry was understrength. Wellington managed this reality by placing his best units at the most threatened points and using the ridge to prevent the French from identifying where the weak joints were until it was too late to exploit them.
That ridge held for seven hours under infantry assault, sustained cavalry charges, and continuous artillery bombardment.
The Hundred Days Campaign Full Pack places the full Allied order of battle on your table in a single purchase: 6,710 Peter Dennis figurines across 33 Plexiglass sprues, covering every nation present on June 18. Standard A comes with 283 MDF bases at 43x43mm for square infantry formations; Standard B provides 526 bases at 43x21mm for players who prefer the double-depth look of Napoleonic line infantry in close order. The Dutch and Belgian contingent within the pack is one of the collection's most historically interesting elements. The Dutch/Belgian Chasseurs, 264 figurines per sprue, represent the light infantry of Wellington's most complicated national contingent - soldiers who had served the French Republic and the Empire, switched allegiance after Waterloo's predecessor campaign, and now held sections of Wellington's ridge against the army they had once fought alongside. Their presence in the collection is a reminder that the Allied army at Waterloo was genuinely and dramatically multinational, not a British victory with supporting cast.
Blücher's Clock
Napoleon's plan on June 18 required Grouchy to keep the Prussians away. It was the only assumption he could not afford to be wrong about, and he was wrong about it.
After the defeat at Ligny two days earlier, a conventional general would have retreated along his line of communication - which ran northeast, away from Wellington. Blücher, 73 years old and having been ridden over by French cavalry after his horse was shot under him at Ligny, was not a conventional general. He retreated north, keeping parallel to Wellington, staying within supporting distance. His chief of staff, Gneisenau, had serious reservations about this decision, but Blücher overruled him. "I gave my word to Wellington," the old marshal said, and that was sufficient.
By mid-afternoon on June 18, lead Prussian corps were already filing into Plancenoit on Napoleon's exposed right rear. The implications were immediate and cascading. French troops intended to reinforce the final Guard assault were diverted south to contain the Prussian breakthrough. The village of Plancenoit changed hands three times in two hours. Napoleon committed the Young Guard, then elements of the Old Guard, to hold a flank that should not have needed holding at all. By the time the main Guard assault on Wellington's ridge stepped off that evening, it was understrength, under-supported, and pushing against a line that had had two additional hours to recover.
The Prussian contingent in the 10mm collection captures Blücher's army as it actually was in 1815. The Prussian Infantry add-on brings 306 figurines to the tabletop on a single 1.5mm Plexiglass sprue - the line battalions and Landwehr militia who arrived at Plancenoit after a forced march and went straight into the attack. Many of these regiments were newly formed, some barely trained, and yet they arrived on time and hit hard enough to unravel Napoleon's entire tactical plan. The Lüneburg Hussars represent the Prussian cavalry arm that kept the French right flank under constant pressure through the afternoon, screening the advancing infantry columns and preventing any French attempt to seal off the Plancenoit approach. At 10mm, on a 90cm x 120cm mat, the Prussian arrival becomes a genuine tactical problem for the French player - regiment after regiment feeding in from the east, appearing on the table edge just as the Guard assault demands full attention at the center.
The Guard Advances - and Breaks
Late on the afternoon of June 18, with the battle approaching seven hours of sustained fighting, Napoleon committed the Imperial Guard.
It was the last move he had. The Guard had not attacked - had barely moved - throughout the day. Their stillness behind the French center had been part of the psychological architecture of the battle: Wellington's men knew the Guard was there, knew that when it moved the battle had entered its final act, and adjusted their morale calculations accordingly. The allied soldiers holding that ridge had endured artillery, cavalry charges in waves, and infantry assaults. They were exhausted, thinned, running low on ammunition in several sectors. If the Guard could find a weak point and drive through it, the ridge might finally break.
It did not break. Wellington had positioned fresh Hanoverian infantry behind the crest, concealed from French observation. The Guard's leading columns, cresting the ridge and expecting to find a beaten army, met a close-range volley that stopped the attack cold. The formations behind, unable to see what had happened ahead through the powder smoke, began to hesitate. Then to pull back. The cry passed back through the French army with devastating speed: "La Garde recule." The Guard is retreating. It was enough. Regiments that had held their positions all day broke and ran. The Old Guard's grenadiers formed square and covered the rout with professional composure, but the battle was finished.
The Imperial Guard Artillery add-on - 48 gunners and gun crews per sprue - represents the batteries that had prepared Wellington's ridge for that final assault, the guns that had fired all day at the Allied center in the expectation of opening the gap the Guard would exploit. On the tabletop, the Guard attack is the scenario's defining decision: when does the French player commit? Too early, and the Allied line is still intact. Too late, and Prussian pressure at Plancenoit has already taken the regiments that should be going forward with them. The whole brutal arithmetic of June 18 is compressed into that one choice. The 10mm Waterloo collection provides every regiment needed to make it meaningful - and to find out, one more time, whether it could have gone differently.
The Scale the Battle Demands
Waterloo is not a battle that reduces gracefully to a skirmish game or a single-regiment encounter. It was fought across three miles of open farmland, simultaneously, by five armies whose actions were interdependent. Hougoumont on the western flank held down an entire French corps for the whole day. La Haie Sainte fell at half-past six and changed the balance of the center. Plancenoit on the east nearly collapsed before the Young Guard was committed to stabilise it. These are not sequential events that can be re-created one at a time - they are concurrent, each affecting the others, each requiring the player to make choices about priorities in real time.
At 28mm, none of this sits on one table. At 10mm, on a 90cm x 120cm mat, it does. Regiment after regiment slots into formation, the full lateral spread of Wellington's ridge becomes visible, and the Prussian approach from the east appears on the same surface where the Guard is forming up to advance. The battle becomes legible at the scale at which it was actually fought.
One More Time
Napoleon lost at Waterloo, but the arguments about why have never stopped. Was it Grouchy's failure to return from Wavre? Ney's mishandling of the cavalry charges in the afternoon? The three-hour delay caused by the wet ground on the morning? The decision to commit the Guard too late, or at the wrong point, or without adequate infantry support? Every one of these questions is answerable on the tabletop in a way it cannot be answered in a seminar. You can send Grouchy back. You can hold the cavalry until the ridge has been properly softened. You can commit the Guard an hour earlier, into a different sector.
That is what Peter Dennis's 10mm Waterloo collection is for. Five armies. One table. The most famous battle in military history, ready to be refought from the first drum roll to the last square.