State of Play: Undaunted: Battle of Britain

 

 

After a week’s break due to a combination of work commitments (on T’s part), sickness (me relapsing), and airport pick-ups (T again), we got together this week on Tuesday for our Monday night game. I’ve been spending my time on a side project that I’ll write something about here soon, so I haven’t been doing any solo gaming, and lately we’ve been roleplaying with the Wednesday group, so things have been quite here. I also have a couple of things half-written, but each needs more time and attention than I’ve been able to spare them or late.

I really wasn’t in the right frame of mind for anything too taxing. This, I thought, is the perfect opportunity to pull out a game I’ve been meaning to get to all year, so we introduced ourselves to the joys and challenges of Undaunted: Battle of Britain (Osprey Games, 2023).

I grabbed Undaunted: Battle of Britain late last year. I wasn’t going to get this one as I didn’t think the essential mechanics would translate so well to arial combat, but I started to hear some very good things about is from people whose opinions I respect, and I found a copy for a good price, so I took a punt. It’s been sitting on my shelf pretty much since. I’d read the rules and had a look at the scenarios, and I’d punched the game and toyed with how best to store the components in the game’s box (it’s not as obvious as previous entries in the series, but I think I’ve worked it out now). I’ve been meaning to pull it out for T for a while now. It’s not the only Undaunted game we haven’t played. I’ve gone through about the first five scenarios of Undaunted: North Africa (Osprey Games, 2020) solo, but I’ve had Undaunted: Stalingrad (Osprey Games, 2022) for even longer than BoB, and have yet to get it to the table; if I’m honest, I find the thought of playing through a dozen of more linked scenarios of Undaunted: Stalingrad, well, let’s say intimidating.

Opening set-up for the first scenario, Battle of France.

This wasn’t T’s first Undaunted game; we did the first in the series, Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games 2019) as a 6x6 game last year (you can read my review here), so it didn’t take long to get into the swing of the game. It probably doesn’t need to be spelt out that Undaunted: Battle of Britain is concerned with the air war over the English Channel and eastern England after the fall of France, as Germany tried to gain air superiority on the front ahead of a proposed invasion of the British Isles. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but it was a close-run thing.*

Undaunted: Battle of Britain plays out in much the same way as the other games in the series as far as the use and play of cards is concerned. After the first turn – the scenario dictates which player has the initiative in the first round - each player draws four cards and uses one of them to bid for the initiative (the right to play their remaining cards first) for that round. The cards will either allow the player to activate one of their planes, or a selection of other options to enhance your chances of victory (such as adding cards to your deck or removing Discord cards, the game’s equivalent to the Fog of War from the other titles). The differences are in the play area and the way the units behave.

Opening set-up from the German perspective.

The play area is a traditional hex-grid, though it’s still made up of interlocking tiles. This makes sense given the importance of movement regulation in this flavour od the game. The components are individual planes grouped in pairs. These are teardrop-shaped counters with the plane illustration facing the pointy end. This marks the direction the plane is facing, important for both movement and combat.

We played the first scenario, The Battle of France. This is a meeting engagement over the French coast between two pairs of Hurricane I’s and a pair of Defiant light bombers on the British side, and two pairs of the faster Bf109's for the Germans. A lead pilot and a wingman make up each pair – this is an important distinction, mechanically – and the pairs are colour-coded for ease of identification. The coal in the scenario is simple; to shoot down a number of the opponent’s planes. The first over the line is the winner.

One round in, and maintaining comms discipline.

Being a first scenario, things are kept simple to introduce the essential concept of the game. When a plane is activated, it does two things; it has a move action, and it has to move at least one hex in the direction it’s facing (in it’s turn it can move it’s total movement allocation, two to three spaces , depending on the plane) and it can either Manoeuvre (turn left or right one hex-side after each space moved, up to it’s Manoeuvre allocation), or it can fly straight and shoot at an enemy plane in its trajectory. This is all pretty straight-forward, but there’s a complication. If a plane finishes its movement with more than one empty hex between it and its partner, they are considered out of communication (comms) and the layer places another Discord card in their discard pile. Like Fog of War, Discord cards clog your hand, giving you less options to act. As T was to find out.

It's possible to want something too much. T was focussed solely on trying to score hits on my planes, at the expense of the cohesion of his units. By about round six he was trying to operate with all eight Discord cards crammed into his action deck. I was able to maintain my pairs’ cohesion – I only gained one Discord card the entire game but at the cost of flumming a potential opportunity or two to strike – but as is my want, when I did manage to get it position I could not roll I couldn't seem to roll higher than a five. T drew first blood on my Yellow lead Hurricane, and eventually I put some holes in the fuselage of one of his 109s.

The Y (Yellow) Flight of BF109s about to lose cohesion (right).

The planes must always face one hex-side. To fire, it must have an enemy plane in the trajectory it's facing. Remember, you can either turn (Manoeuvre) or shoot, so you have to anticipate where the target is likely to be in the next turn and position yourself accordingly, then hope you get to act on your advantage before the other guy gets away. When you take your shot, your chance of hitting is rarely better than 50%, usually much lower. Like in other undaunted games, the base to-hit number is the number on the shield on the plane token (usually 5, though the Defiants are rated four, which feels right), and you add to that your distance in hexes from the target. If you're shooting at a Messerschmitt three hexes distant, you'll need to roll higher than an 8 (5 armour/pilot skill + 3 range) on one of the two dice you're rolling. The 109s get to roll three dice, which is fair; Hurricanes and Defiants were outfitted with .303 calibre machine guns, whereas the 109s toted a nose-mounted cannon with exploding shells.

The first hit went to T. When you take a hit, you remove one of the cards for that
plane from the game (placed sideways to indicate it's a loss). The order serve
double to act as hit-points and to reduce the flight and combat effectiveness
of the damaged plane.

As it was getting late, we called the game before reaching a definitive conclusion. We had each scored two hits each, but no planes were actually shot down. Everyone made it back to their home airfields ready for the next altercation. But by the end of the session, we both had a good working knowledge of the game, ready for the next scenario, Dynamo (introducing Stukas and targets… er, ships to the mix).

The Y-flight Bf109s continuing to accrue Discord with every activation.

While it’s a departure from the other games in terms of board-play, I’m leaning toward declaring Undaunted: Battle of Britain as maybe the best entry for players new to the system, I want to play a few more games before I make a hard call, but there is a trimming down of options here with all of the units being subject to the same set of limitations (though with varying capacities within those constrains), making it an inherently simpler game, while still maintaining the tension of multiple difficult decisions with every round.

 

* If you’re interested in learning more about the Battle of Britain and the significance of Britain’s victory in the broader canvas of the Second World War, you could do worse than to read Stephen Bungay’s The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain.