There's no denying that we're in the middle of a major renaissance for table top games. There have never been more titles available, the standard of quality has never been so high, and the hobby is more mainstream than it has ever been. With the vast proliferation of games currently hitting the market, game designers are forced to think more creatively in order to have their game stand out. One way to do that is by combining different game mechanisms.
Undaunted: Normandy features one of the more unlikely combos, mixing deck building (a relatively modern and extremely popular game type) with old-school counters-and-maps wargaming.
Wargaming has a long and storied history that I won't even attempt to go into here. These types of games have always emphasized accuracy and detail over aesthetics and accessibility, and only a few (such as Twilight Struggle) have managed to get much attention in the wider world of gaming, outside of their dedicated player base. Undaunted: Normandy attempts to rectify that by updating the classic wargame with elegant, streamlined rules, simple but well-designed components, and much nicer artwork.
The game is scenario based, running through a series of historical World War 2 battles each with its own board setup and asymmetrical victory conditions. The board is composed of tiles representing different terrain types such as forests, rivers, and open fields. These tiles are easily rearranged to depict a wide variety of different European battlefields. Each player starts the game with different types of units such as infantry or commanders, each with different abilities. Attacking opposing units is done by rolling dice, with the tiles providing a target number based on distance and cover. It's a very elegant system that is easy to remember during play, requiring very little (if any) looking up of complicated rules.
The real brilliance of the game, however, is the way it incorporates the deck-building mechanism. In most deck building games, players begin with a rudimentary deck of basic cards, and then add better cards to their deck as the game progresses. The same is true here, with the cards representing the different units on the board. Cards are played to move and attack with those units, and also used to keep track of how much damage a unit has taken. When one of your units on the board is hit by an attack, you take one of that unit's cards out of the deck and placing it out of play. You can mitigate damage by adding more of that unit's cards (purchasing them from a supply row, a common feature of most deck building games), but eventually you will run out of a specific unit's cards, and when you do, that unit is destroyed.
Additionally, the game uses "Fog of War" cards to track the unpredictability of warfare. These are essentially blank cards that players are forced to add to their decks at various points during the game, with each one decreasing your chances of drawing the unit card you need during your turn.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) It may not offer a pinpoint-accurate combat simuation, but Undaunted: Normandy gives us a modern, accessible WWII battle game, ingeniously combining deck building with an updated move-and-attack wargame.
- Undaunted: Normandy official website
- Undaunted: Normandy on BoardGameGeek