by Jim Owczarski, 10 April 2025
Forgive this interruption in the record of my quest to bring the world of Star Wars to the wargame table. I spent several hours this week putting thoughts to page about Adepticon 2025 and its first visit to Milwaukee. What I did not write about nearly enough was one of the main reasons I was so excited to go, namely, the opportunity to get in a live, in-person, honest-to-goodness tabletop game of Et Sans Resultat! with the man behind it, David Ensteness.
I have great regard for this system. We have had not one but two live-plays featuring the author, one of which begins here:
Based on a handful of comments I received at Adepticon, it would seem these lengthy videos have the status of an in joke in the ESR! community, with at least one person telling me he painted the better part of an army while re-playing it in the background. If you Google “Et Sans Resultat!” all three of the resulting videos are ours.
When David chose to come out with a line of 10mm Napoleonic miniatures, which is still rolling along, this website hosted a two-part interview, the first bit of which is here and the second here.
Having spent hours trying to study the rules and then umpire them on-line, I had never had a chance to shove a base with wee plastic voltigeurs about. I had my chance a few days ago.
I was left with a lot of thoughts.
Starting at the very beginning, this was the table on which we played.
click images to enlarge
The first thing that usually draws attention are the maps. Hand-crafted (David forgot this brand new one at his home in the Minnesota and had to drive overnight to get it back to Milwaukee) they always impress. For anyone familiar with the form, they are also the first indication that something unusual is afoot. The scale is evidently zoomed-out with roads, buildings, and other terrain features usually associated with grand-tactical modern games. This is matched by the infantry bases which one learns represent a full battalion apiece. The scale will, not, then permit the familiar forming of columns, lines, and squares, but we also do not have the broadly-drawn brigades of Volley and Bayonet or Dragoon-favorite Blucher. It is a very dangerous thing to speak of “only” or “unique”, but this basing reminds me only of that for the divisional game in Dr. Paddy Griffith’s Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun1.
ESR!, however, goes well beyond the bare bones of that work. As can be seen, lovely infantry columns crawl along the battlefield, marching towards objectives given to them by their commanders. Some will go there directly, straight as an arrow. Others will be authorized to use roads or avoid difficult terrain. Still others will be directed to support nearby troops and follow in their shadow. All these lead to critical moments where troops have to leave their columns and deploy for battle.
They will not be able to do this quickly. They will often take the better part of an hour (each turn is 20 minutes) to shake out fully. Doing this too close to the enemy can have grim consequences as enemies charge undeployed columns and see them off. Doing this too far away will result in very slow marches to contact and difficult maneuvering.
Prediction, movement, and position is everything. I do not know if David would assent to the use of the term, but I have never seen a Napoleonic system that better represents the consequences falling outside of your opponents OODA loop. It will be more than traffic jams.
Combat is strangely abstract. There is “skirmishing” and melee in which the “Threat” thrown by one side is measured against the “Cohesion” of the other. Differences between the former and the latter of sufficient size can cause fatigue which than then result in units breaking. How you get to the fight — ranges are unsurprisingly very close at this scale — and the position you are in when you do are far more important than all the foregoing. I do not exaggerate when I say it really does feel like you are watching the armies maneuver, engage, perhaps maneuver a bit more, and then break away. It is absolutely higher level than most are used to.
So where is all this heading?
First and foremost, the on-line games will soon include ESR! again. I bought every book and deck David had for sale as well as a snazzy penguin bag. The mighty Mechanical Turk has already built a lovely Eggmuhl map and I am ready to create the scenario you see in these pictures.
I still cannot get past the fact, though, that we have now been privileged to play introductory scenarios with David no fewer than three times and not once have we managed to fight to a conclusion. I have wondered a lot about why this is so and have concluded:
1. We are a fussy bunch. We want to know “WHY” with the frequency of a three-year-old. It comes naturally and without apology. Anyone who says Robert is the only one who is this way is mistaken.
2. David, despite his appearance and charges to the contrary, is not a reincarnation of Rasputin. He is a reincarnation of Don Quixote. He created ESR! initially to “fix” a rule set that I will not name and eventually realized he could write the whole thing better. In this digital age, he is putting out an entire line of Napoleonic miniatures, giving as his goal the offering of every unit that appears in his well-research, well-illustrated source books. I cannot think of a better painting guide than that provided therein. For heaven’s sake, in 2025 he bought a booth on the show floor at Adepticon to hawk grenadiers within easy shouting distance of a life-sized Ultramarine terminator statue. This has consequences. He is deeply read in wargames and Napoleonics. He has views. He likes sharing them. This takes time. Related thereunto, see #1 above.
3. David, by his own admission, writes “dense” rules. There are many pages in the lovely, hardbound rule book for ESR! that the veteran player does not need. Despite the relatively low rules page count, there is a lot going on in each rule. They are definitely not chatty, but they are dense. Matters are not improved by his love of antique words like “ployed” for units in column and “embarrassing” terrain when most normal people would speak of “difficult”.
4. These rules are just that different. They break any number of assumptions and can frustrate those who try to play them using those assumptions. Waiting for order activations, waiting for the correct moment in a turn to do a particular thing, having your precious redeployment area punched out by roving cossacks; all this has a real potential to be aggravating.
Unbent, unbowed, and undeterred, back to the table we go. We welcome you to join us, if only to mock our confusion.
Perhaps you will join Marshal Murat in proclaiming, “Quel massacre! Et sans résultat!”
Adepticon 2025
PART ONE ~ PART TWO ~ PART THREE
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I sincerely debated correcting the final quotation from Murat to Ney. I think I should be shamed for this, but do not want people to be incorrectly informed.