Undaunted: Reinforcements

Product Information

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. A modular expansion that adds a solo mode, four-player mode, and a wealth of new content to the award-winning Undaunted: Normandy and Undaunted: North Africa. So every scenario is inspired by a real scenario, but we are not trying to recreate that scenario accurately. And similarly, if you know about the structure of a platoon, and you’re playing the game like ‘Wow, there’s the correct number of riflemen in the squad’, you should be able to see those things. But you certainly shouldn’t need to know those things to play it. We will always err on the side of making it a good game before anything else. DT: I think Guide is the only action that you can take to help your partner’s units. Otherwise, you can’t control their units.

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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: My tastes as you all know run hot and cold and I’m always moving on to something either new or that I want to reassess…but like Lovecraft, WWII is on my “never again” list. I allow for exceptional games, and I think this is one despite the subject matter.

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.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. 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. 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. Fail to find one and that unit is removed from the game. Interestingly, given the nature of scenarios, we had several missions in our playthrough with no casualties, where both sides focussed on the objectives and this seems counter to other war games I’ve played but thematically fit perfectly. So, Is This Expansion For You?