Undaunted: North Africa: A sequel to the WWII deckbuilding game (Games)

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If you haven’t played an Undaunted game before, the gameplay is through card drafting, hand management and throwing dice to determine hits taken. You can choose any single scenario to play on its own but the real value of this game comes through playing through the whole campaign with another player, and that’s the way I experienced it.

And that’s before you even decide what to do with the cards you have left during your actual turn. I’ve found that trying to ‘rush’ objectives can be useful if you happen to pull the right card combinations, but never under-estimate the value of trying to suppress or otherwise kill a key opposing unit. Many scenarios involve specific ‘kill’ objectives anyway, but for the control/destroy missions, making sure the enemy’s Demolition Expert or Rifleman is killed early will slow down your foe, giving you time to complete your objectives. 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. All the game does is set you up for a battle. It does so in a satisfying deep way, using historical moments or military genius. What happens next is up to you. Playing through each mission feels fresh and exciting. I do not see us growing tired of this for a long time. I would heartily recommend this game to anyone who enjoys two player games. People who enjoy games with tight tough decisions. People who are looking for something with a story, be that ongoing with the campaign, or simply on the individual missions. I would recommend this game to anyone who wants to teach their children something about what those who lived before us, so bravely fought for. This game is a wonderful experience that seems to transcend similar games with a fantasy setting. One of the major changes in the game is the scale. In North Africa, each of the combat counters that are on the board represent a single soldier, rather than a unit of soldiers. This means that each card you play is just one man. Compare this to Normandy where each of the combat counters represented different soldiers in a squad. This principle can best be illustrated by taking a look at the following two pictures. There’s no range in Undaunted, but shots are harder to land the further away you are. Combat involves a simple D10 roll, and you have to score higher than the opposing unit’s defence value, which includes all modifiers gained from range and terrain.This fact doesn’t majorly change the way the game plays but it does create a more intimate experience of a small team of commandoes or individual soldiers that each bring a unique role and set of skills to play in the missions. In fact, there are only 4 cards representing each of the soldiers on your team in North Africa and this means that you cannot take as many hits as you would have been able to in Normandy with 5 soldiers represented by a combat counter. This subtly changes the way you have to play the game though and gives you less expendable assets and forces you to play a bit more cautiously…or to throw caution to the wind and just go for objectives. The new scenarios and units offer some new variability and options for two player games, with the ability to add on to existing campaigns which is particularly helpful for me as my last campaign of North Africa ended in a stalemate and this gives the perfect opportunity to determine the overall winner. The Undaunted series, designed by esteemed collaborators David Thompson & Trevor Benjamin and published by Osprey Games, is terrific. Let’s not mince words. With four installments and a substantial expansion, the series has yet to miss. There’s something for everyone, provided everyone is a fan of approachable World War II-themed two-player skirmish games. After initiative is set, each player plays out their hand, one card at a time, performing an action with the corresponding unit. A variety of actions exist within Undaunted, depending on the units represented on the board. Moving, firing, and seizing control of important tiles are standard, but there’s a lot more going on.

Instead of the well-trod conflict between Americans and Germans on the beaches of Normandy, North Africa covers the conflict between the British Long Range Desert Group and the Royal Italian Army across colonial northern Africa. This may appeal to you over Normandy for a few reasons. The tough thing here is, well, one play didn’t get us to tinker with vehicles yet. So I know there’s something more to talk about in this one – which will inevitably end up being covered in a review of the game – but it takes away a potential talking point here from first impressions. And that’s fine, the first scenario eases new players in and shows Undaunted veterans some of the differences between this game and the previous Normandy title. Let’s just say it feels as different already, like going from playing Commands & Colors: Ancients to playing Napoleonics. It looks and feels the same but at the same time, it feels like so much more has been added and integrated to enhance the core system. Everything you loved about Undaunted: Normandy is here, with polish, and a sprinkle of novel new features. There are few war games that are accessible while remaining ‘truly’ a war game. This one is nearly perfect, and with enough community scenarios in the future, might be the only one you need. PLAY IT? MUST-PLAY 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 The other big thing, of course, in Normandy is we’ve added tanks on both sides. This was interesting because there’s obviously a tank in the North Africa base game, but they work quite differently here because of the scale.

Why Undaunted: North Africa, or, Do You Like Vehicles?

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.

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. Perhaps even more so than Normandy, North Africa’s ultra-polished gameplay makes it a great game; the immersive, careful details on top make it an exceptional experience. Perhaps I was just used to playing a campaign of Undaunted with a friend which meant I had adapted to their tactics and strategies but I felt that this offered a whole new set of challenges and puzzles for me to solve.Across the series, each player controls either Axis or Allied forces. Your specific units are represented by tokens on the board, and those tokens are controlled by cards. Each round, both players draw a hand of four cards, choosing one to discard as a bid for initiative. Highest initiative goes first, which can be a big deal depending on the state of the board. It’s almost always better to be setting the immediate terms than it is to be responding to them. As David says we need more plays. We typically shoot for five prior to doing the actual review. This is true with the Undaunted series as different units are introduced over the course of play. 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. DT: One thing that also helped us, I think, is that Duncan Malloy [who signed the game to Osprey Games] actually commissioned Undaunted: North Africa before Normandy was ever even released. So Trevor and I have worked on Undaunted games two years out. We were done with the design for North Africa before Undaunted: Normandy released. Having that prepped and ready to within a year of Normandy being well received and released, I think that helped, too.

But generally speaking, it’s driven by a system where you take a set of cards that are specific to the units in the scenario – so if you’re playing scenario four in Undaunted: Normandy, you’re going to go find the AI for each individual unit for scenario four. In most scenarios, scouts are trying to do basically the same thing, so the scout AI card might be the same for scenarios four through nine, for example.

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The vehicles are a shrewd addition to the gameplay, giving the encounters and environments of North Africa a distinct feel versus Normandy’s solely squad-based tactics without adding any extra heft or headaches to the rules. The increased troop variety on both sides means that unit types now consist of a single unified squad, plus a separate squad type for the Italians’ tank crew, rather than up to three squads for the same unit type as in Normandy. As a result, units feel far more distinct and there’s greater tactical consideration in how each unit’s unique abilities are utilised, whether it’s the sniper’s ability to move outside of scouted tiles, the engineer’s use in repairing damaged vehicles or the saboteur’s power to blow up the newly-added building tiles. In this first picture you will see that the Italian Rifleman has a combat counter that represents that soldier on the board and then you will see his card to the left of the counter. Each of the 4 Rifleman Cards included is a picture of the same soldier. How do we know it is the same soldier, aside from the fact that the picture is the same on all 4 cards? It is found in the name of the soldier which is Benito Romano, and the fact that it appears on all 4 cards. Vehicles are one of the major new additions in Undaunted: North Africa, allowing both sides to jump in and traverse the desert. | Image credit: Sarah Jarvis Since it only carries a value of ‘1’ however, you’re not going to win that bid. Best case scenario is that your opponent also chooses to get rid of a Fog of War card and so it’s a tie. When initiative is tied, the player who currently has initiative keeps it. But if you don’t have initiative, what do you? Keep your good cards so you can make your turn more powerful? Spend a good card so you can go first? 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!