Undaunted: Reinforcements

Product Information

Armour and Armament gives rules for using vehicles in Normandy and also includes two new specialists: US Grenadiers and German Submachine Gunners. It also adds four new scenarios that make use of these new units. Similarly, Under Cover of Night introduces landmines to the gameplay of North Africa, as well as four new scenarios. Pre-pub link is up, and the game is getting great numbers to start. https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1083-wings-for-the-baron-deluxe-gmt-edition.aspx Trevor and I aren’t that familiar with this. My general stance on solo design is if I’m working on a solo game, I like it to be solo from the start. And if it’s a multiplayer game that we worked on, then I feel way more comfortable with somebody that has the skills of turning a multiplayer game into a solitaire game, which is a skill set I don’t have.

Anthony Howgego and Filip Hartelius (Osprey's game development team) were responsible for transforming David Digby's design concepts into an elegant card system. The end result is the "Enemy Unknown" system of playing Undaunted solitaire, a system that when combined with Normandy and North Africa allows you to play either faction in 31 different scenarios for 62 total different solo play experiences!

But once you have those out, it’s relatively straightforward: if the AI plays a scout, do this thing. If you can’t do /this/ thing, do /that/ thing. If you’ve ever seen a Dávid Turczi decision tree design, it’s very familiar. The biggest change of this expansion must be the solo mode. Armour and Armament, Under the Cover of Night, and Friendly Fire all kind of add in things you’ve already seen. Sure, there are new units and scenarios, but it’s nothing that feels wholly different from the core games. It’s more content that you’ve already come to know and love. I mean, I’ll take it, but it’s not the star of the show. The AI card will handle the enemy’s tactics for solo play.

Michael Barnes wrote: Not really. Maybe a touch just because no Nazis. But same conflict. I’m not interested in games about real world conflicts right now at all regardless of theater or time period TBH. I think if you know what’s happened in Wargaming in the last 15 to 20 years – with the transition to card-driven games and COIN games that have euro inspirations – that sort of paved the way for a wargaming community that would be accepting of a light crossover game like this. And just from the general trend of games, it’s very difficult to categorise many games at this point as a eurogame, or an ameritrash game, or wargame. The hybridization of games has absolutely helped us. It straddles all the camps; the communities on both sides are primed for this kind of game already. Likewise, Joint Operations is… fine. While yes, it does allow you to play the game with four players instead of two, all it really does is split your role into two halves. Much like Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit or War of the Ring does, it takes a two-player game and shoehorns in more players by dividing up things that one player was already doing. I’ve never been a fan of this style of player scaling. But it’s there if you really want it. So on the Reinforcements Normandy side, each tank is a single unit on the board, and each card is one of the crewmen. It’s abstract, but essentially each of the cards can perform all of the actions of the tank. We haven’t specialised the crewmen cards.So Osprey turned to one of the top designers in the solitaire boardgame world: Dávid Turczi . Dávid set about designing the core solitaire system, eventually settling on a card-based system that tailors the AI for each unit in every scenario. While this system does a fantastic job of simulating the experience of playing against another human player, it also meant that every single scenario needed to be deconstructed for the creation of the tailored AI. This Herculean task fell to David Digby , who set about implementing the specific AI routines. Four player mode works by giving the third and forth players fewer cards but ultimately is a simple re-hashing of the main game, I’ve only had one opportunity to try it and it didn’t overcomplicate or elongate the scenario too much and it felt like a nice optional addition should the chance to play with four arises. Finally Well, here comes the cavalry. Not literally of course. Instead, we’ve got the introduction of David Digby and Dávid Turczi to give us further ways to play the game in solo and four-player modes. However, it’s not the new cards that are the real draw in Undaunted: Reinforcements. Rather it’s the unassuming set of AI routines that allow solo play of any scenario in the first two games, plus the new ones included here. What I’d been expecting here was a bot-like chart akin to something you might find in a COIN game. Instead, to my surprise, I discover that there are multiple routines by unit type and scenario. So a Rifleman unit in scenario 1 of Undaunted: Normandy will play differently from the same unit in scenario 2 and differently again in scenario 4. I worry this will slow the game down since there are too many variables to learn by heart. Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan...Can you take the glamour out of a Cobra, or getting stoned at China Beach? It's like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn." He pointed to a picture he'd taken, Flynn laughing maniacally ("We're winning," he'd said), triumphantly. "Nothing the matter with that boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." He was really speechless, working his hands up and down to emphasize the sheer insanity of it.

David Thompson: For the eight new scenarios we’re adding, you can play each of those two-player or four-player. But the solo play is a little bit out of control. It’s literally every single scenario from Normandy, every single scenario from North Africa, plus the eight new scenarios. And you can play each one as either side [US vs. Germans, or Italians vs. British]. So there’s 62 ways to play solo, and every one of those is tailored to the scenario. DT: Team play, for sure. My favourite part in any game, ever, is team play. Like Birth of America: 1775, or Quartermaster General – any sort of light wargame that supports team play – that’s my jam. Undaunted: Reinforcements introduces a range of new rules, scenarios, and units. Unleash the might of the German and American tanks and see how your new squad options fare against them in Undaunted: Normandy, or make use of mines, assault aircraft, and other new units as you attempt to outfox your opponent in Undaunted: North Africa. In either arena, test your mettle in a solo mode by Dávid Turczi and David Digby, or play a four-player mode that takes Undaunted to an unprecedented scale. The main draw of this box has to be the solo content it offers. I play a lot of games solo and was delighted to try out the first few scenarios of both Normandy and North Africa to see how they matched up against their two player counterparts and I was delighted at how much of a challenge they presented.

And maybe the hype didn't help it in my eyes either. I expected a lot going in (I remember it being termed a "Memoir 44 killer" which it certainly is not) and so my bar was kinda high. I genuinely struggle with why I can't put my interest in WW2 away, despite all the horrors of conflict and Nazism. But I can't. Sorry. It makes me feel like a bad person. I've spent very many long hours trying to reconcile my thoughts on this, and the closest I've come is summed up by this quote from Dispatches: Undaunted: Reinforcements is a modular expansion that introduces a range of new rules, scenarios, and units. Unleash the might of the German and American tanks and see how your new squad options fare against them in Undaunted: Normandy, or make use of mines, assault aircraft, and other new units as you attempt to outfox your opponent in Undaunted: North Africa. Whether you have one Undaunted game or the other, with Reinforcements you can play for the first time in a four-player mode, or test your mettle in a solo mode by Dávid Turczi and David Digby. Many fans of Undaunted would argue that the biggest addition Reinforcements brings is an official solo system for the game. When we discussed the idea of adding a solo system of the game with Osprey, we told them that we'd prefer not to design it ourselves. (Trevor hasn't had much experience in designing solitaire systems, and David prefers to design games to be solitaire from the beginning rather than adapting a solo system to a multiplayer game.)

WWII fetishism is a lingering turd clinging to the ass of Boomer America. Younger generations have inherited this turd from aging and now elderly gamers. It’s time to cut it loose and move on. Virtually all of the really interesting, compelling, and successful war games of the past decade + have either NOT been about WWI or about some underexplored niche subtopic. DT: One thing we’ve introduced for North Africa is mines, and the ability to create chokepoints. They play significantly in the design of the new scenarios. That is probably the biggest new addition, especially for the LRDG [British Army]. You can place and remove mines, which only damage your opponent. So it gives you the flexibility to do some really interesting interactions with the board that didn’t exist in the game before. You couldn’t really interact with the board state. DT: One thing we should say, just to give credit where credit’s due, is that Dávid Turczi designed the original concept of the solo system, but I think the vast, vast majority of the work that was done, was done by David Digby. He basically did all of the scenario development, and Anthony Howgego, who is a developer at Osprey, did a ton of the development on it, too.TB: I think it does the right job of adding that extra bit for people who are familiar with it. And it brings in a new community of people who specifically wanted a solo experience. So it’s the definitive solo mode. From the beginning, there’s been lots of community, homegrown solo versions, but I guarantee you that none of the ones out there have put as much effort into what Digby and Turczi and Anthony put into this. Rather than rest on their well-earned laurels, Osprey games are deciding to spoil fans of the Undaunted series with even further treats. Undaunted: Reinforcements.