For Educators
Berthier is a digital umpire for Flight of the Eagle, Didier Rouy’s matrix kriegsspiel of the Napoleonic campaigns from 1792 to 1815. It was built for teaching strategy in graduate seminars, where the point of a wargame is not to win it but to understand why the decisions made in it worked or failed.
The umpire holds the true state of the campaign and adjudicates movement, combat, supply, weather, sieges and the passage of dispatches by the published rules. Each student commands as a historical figure and sees only what that commander’s couriers, scouts and maps could have told him. Orders take time to arrive, reports arrive late and sometimes wrong, and a subordinate acts on the last order he received, not the one his commander meant to send. Students learn the problem Napoleon and his marshals actually faced: deciding with an incomplete picture against an opponent who is deciding too.
Because the app does the bookkeeping, the instructor can umpire instead of calculating, and a campaign that would take days on paper can be played in a class session or two. Assistant umpires can each take charge of their own players, so a large class can be split across several instructors, and the whole game can run online for students who are not in the room.
Everything is logged: every order, dispatch, report and adjudication, each stamped with what its writer knew when it was written. In the after-action review the instructor can reconstruct any commander’s picture at any past decision point, so the discussion turns on the decision as it looked at the time rather than as it looks in hindsight. The historical record gives the comparison: what the real commanders did from the same position, in their own correspondence and in the campaign histories, and how far the students’ game departed from it.
Berthier runs in a web browser. The umpire needs the published rules of Flight of the Eagle and a scenario; Berthier carries sixteen scenarios from 1792 to 1815, including the 1796 Italian campaign and the 1809 Danube campaign. Players need nothing but a browser.