TDG: Cody's Top Ten Solitaire Wargames (November 2025)

About Vive L'Empereur!, from BoardGameGeek:

Vive L'Empereur! is an exciting, solitaire wargame depicting the Battle of Waterloo fought on June 18, 1815. Controlling the French side as the Emperor Napoleon, you have conducted a brilliant campaign so far against not one, but two, Allied armies, defeating Field Marshal Blucher's Prussians at Ligny and forcing the Anglo-Allied army under the Duke of Wellington to retreat from Quatre Bras. You have sent a wing of your army under Marshal Grouchy to keep the Prussians and the British-Dutch armies separate. Meanwhile, Wellington and his Dutch allies with 68,000 men have fallen back to a ridge line before the small town of Waterloo. On this rainy and muddy day, your 72,000-strong French army must defeat the Anglo-Allied Army before the Prussians can regroup, avoid Grouchy, and arrive on the battlefield at Waterloo. Are you up for the challenge? Vive L'Empereur is a hex-and-counter war game that uses a chit-pull system to generate random force activations for both sides. The Anglo-Allied and Prussian forces (the forces of the solitaire side) move and conduct combat using random instructions from the game's Activation Table. -description from the publisher