State of Play: Undaunted: Normandy (1/6)

 

Last night I introduced T to Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019), and in doing so I feel like I was also being introduced to it. I’ve Had the follow-up game, Undaunted: North Africa (Osprey, 2020) for about a year, have threatened to pull it out among company, but so far have only played it two-handed a couple of times, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Undaunted: North Africa plays at a different scale to Undaunted: Normandy; in North Africa, the markers represent individual soldiers and specialists, whereas the markers in the West European theatre game represent mostly rifle squads and weapons teams. I begged off getting Normandy when it first came out, in spite of the positive reviews I read, but after playing North Africa, I was intrigued. Before Christmas last year, I found a copy of Undaunted: Reinforcements (Osprey, 2021) for a good price and that sinched the deal for me. Normandy arrived about a week after the Reinforcements did.

Before last night I’d only got Normandy to the table once, a couple of days earlier, to get a feel for it and to remind myself of how the mechanics worked. The basics are the same in the two games, although I was surprised to see some combatants get more cards to draw from the pool than others, but this makes sense; the scout has a maximum of three cards available, whereas the Riflemen have five cards, which makes sense, being of a squad rather combat than a single soldier). Scouting, movement and combat all worked the same, and the early scenarios are capture-the-flag operations, so it’s an easy enough game to digest.

I’m not the best at explaining games. One of my gaming buddies, B, is a teacher, and he prefers to dive in and explain what each player’s options are as they become available. When I was explaining the game to T, I don’t think I detailed the objective clearly enough. The first scenario, Le Reye, is won by the first side to control areas with objective markers to adding up to five points, or “pin” the opposing side’s riflemen (remove both squads from the board). The Germans start with an advantage of a three-point objective marker on their starting position, though they must leave its relative safety to secure the remaining points to win.

T played the Germans. I wasn’t going to go easy on him, but I wanted T to win this first game, because most people have a more positive reaction to a new game if they at least feel like they could have won. Having retained the home tile, T quickly moved to scout and get a rifleman unit to a two-point objective tile (the farmhouse). Then he spent his next couple of commands for that squad trying to shoot my units rather than taking control of the tile and winning the game.

A long time ago I made a choice not to persist in pointing out missed opportunities to T. We have played a lot of games over the years, and when he’s assimilated a new game, T is a solid opponent. Not last night, though. After the third missed opportunity to seize victory, I managed to get a rifleman to his home tile and took control of his three secured points. I felt a little bad doing it, but it should help him keep in mind the objective when we go on to scenario 2.