It was one of the first board wargames produced and despite its lack of historicity and complexity, it still received positive comments more than twenty years later as a fun and playable game, and remained in Avalon Hill's catalogue until 1990.

When Napoleon returned from 11 months of exile on Elba in 1815, the powers that had defeated him the previous year quickly formed the Seventh Coalition and mobilized large armies to march on Paris.

As the first step, Napoleon marched into Belgium, hoping to defeat the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-Dutch force before it could rendezvous with the Prussian army under Marshal Blucher.

"[4] The 30-turn campaign is the only game provided, although Avalon Hill published a number of alternate scenarios in various issues of their house magazine, The General.

Some players complained the game was unbalanced and some rules were ambiguous, and to address these concerns, a second edition was designed by Lindsey Schultz and released in 1978.

"[4] In The Guide to Simulations/Games for Education and Training, Martin Campion commented "Among avid players of wargames, Waterloo is known as a 'classic', which means that it has little claim to historical accuracy but that it is old and fun to play.

Chadwick also believed "There is little historical accuracy in either map set-up or counters ... this was the first of many Waterloo games in which opposing armies formed more or less solid fronts across the board, quite unlike the real battle and more WW2 than Napoleonic."

On the contrary, Waterloo and other early Avalon Hill games "stood alone, covering a single conflict situation with a bespoke system, components and rules.