General Orders: World War II gets wargaming down to the bare essentials

General Orders: World War II, by Undaunted creators David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, is an interesting game that abstracts two of the most iconic types of battles from that war to the point that it doesn't really matter which side is which. Players merely choose to play as either yellow or blue and start on opposite sides of the board, which the game even declines to name as a particular theatre of war, instead calling them either "alpine" or "island," depending on which game mode you choose to play.

The game is a mix of worker placement and area control, with a bit of card play thrown in for good measure. The boards are divided up into hexes, with the path to victory being to deploy and move armies in an advance towards the center of the board. The game ends after four rounds, with players scoring points based on which map hexes their armies occupy, but it can also end early if a player manages to occupy their opponent's headquarters space on the opposite side of the board.

Each hex has one or two worker placement spaces. Most of them are used to move armies into the hex, with a few offering different options like landing paratroopers or firing artillery into nearby spaces. The hexes in the middle of the board offer in-game bonuses for occupying them such as gaining extra troops, extending the range of artillery, or drawing cards. If a player moves into a hex occupied by the opponent's troops, the conflict is played out with a simple dice roll followed by an attrition mechanic that removes an even number of each player's troops until only one player's troops remain.

The game uses cards to add a little extra uncertainty to the combat, with cards providing advantages such as extra dice, rerolls, troop reinforcements, and even extra turns.

The alpine board is the basic game, with each side using paratroopers and artillery to fight over a village surrounded by mountains. The island board represents a beach assault adding planes that can drop bombs on locations and help control the areas they're flying over. Even with that added bit of complexity, the game manages to be wonderfully simple, distilling a war game down to being about as simple as it can be while still being engaging for the players. And, like all of Osprey's board game offerings, the graphic design, illustration, and component quality are all top-notch.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a neat little game that strips out unnecessary historical detail in favor of getting down to the mechanics of combat in two of the most prevalent types of World War II battles.

• General Orders: World War II official website
• General Orders: World War II on BoardGameGeek

A short review of a short game: Blitzkrieg!

Blitzkrieg! World War Two in 20 Minutes is a great little two-player board game. The short play time, bright colors, clear graphic design, small table footprint, and minimal text make it a solid choice to play at a pub or coffee shop, or even over a lunch break at work.

Each player starts with a bag full of tokens representing air, ground and sea forces, with a separate pile of tokens next to the board for more powerful units and technological advancements that can be gained during the game. The board is divided up into the different theatres of war, each with spaces to place tokens, and a scoring track that moves back and forth based on which player has placed the highest value units in that theatre. Some spaces give bonuses when a token is placed, such as drawing extra tiles or gaining the aforementioned advanced units and tech.

Players start by drawing three tiles, which are placed behind a screen so the other player can't see them. They then take turns placing tiles on the board and drawing new ones, the idea being to score points by filling up rows of tiles in the different theatres. Most of the strategy is in deciding when and where to place your tiles -- you might need to take advantage of a certain space's bonus, but filling up a row gives points to the player who is furthest along on that theatre's scoring track, so you don't want to leave good openings for your opponent. It's very chess-like; you constantly feel like you are making sacrifices in one area in order to gain ground in another.

The current edition of the game includes a variant that assumes an alternate reality where Germany and Japan won the war and are now fighting over the United States. It uses a new board (cleverly printed on the back side of the main board) with the theatres of war replaced by major U. S. cities. Rather than just being a re-skin of the main game, this one plays a little differently. The game starts with four cities available to place tiles in, and as each city's tile row fills up, the player who finished it gets to pick the next active city from nearby options. The German player gets the same set of tiles from the main game, but the Japanese have their own set, which includes a secret weapon in the form of a certain larger-than-life reptile...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Blitzkrieg! is a well-designed game that really shows what you can do with minimal components and clear, simple design.

• Blitzkrieg: World War Two in 20 Minutes official website
• Blitzkrieg: World War Two in 20 Minutes on BoardGameGeek

Going to war with Undaunted: Normandy

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.

The deck building element is elegantly incorporated and solves a lot of problems with battlefield simulation games such as keeping track of damage, limiting how often a particular unit can act, and determining when reinforcements are available. Combined with the location tiles that keep track of often difficult game elements like cover, range, and line of sight, we have a wargame that is intuitive and easy to play.

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