State of Play: Undaunted: Battle of Britain (redux)

 

Nominated for the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best World War II Game, 2023

 

For our Monday game T and I returned to Undaunted: Battle of Britain (Osprey Games, 2023). We played the second scenario in the set, I went to T’s house this week, so I had to set up before we could play (if T is coming to mine, I can usually have a game and a cup of coffee ready to go when he arrives).

This gave me the opportunity to gauge just how long a game takes form set-up to tear-down. We played Scenario 2 – Operation Dynamo. Set up time for this scenario (from scratch) was about twenty-five minutes, which I think I may have been able to keep to twenty if it weren’t for some unrequested assistance of a junior member of the household. Upturning the game's box lid fixed this intrusion.

Undaunted: Battle of Britain - now with all Claude-approved components.

We began play at about 9:20pm and wrapped up at a little after 11:00 and were packed up again by 11:15pm. So, the game took a shade over an hour-forty to play out. Take out the time for rules referrals, cat-petting, and taking phone calls a couple of times, and we’d be getting down to about hour, maybe an hour-fifteen of actual play, which would fit with our experience of other Undaunted games, but it made for a late night.

Like it says on the can, Scenario 2: Dynamo is concerned with the Dunkirk evacuation. There are six seagoing vessels at anchor off the coast of France. It’s up to the RAF to protect the seaborne evacuation effort from the threat of air assault as best they can. Gerry has to try to stop as many of the BEF from making it home as he can. For a mechanically fun and breezy game, Undaunted titles can cover some pretty dark history.

A couple of rounds in, and everybody's still in comms.

The Dynamo scenario introduces two new elements to the game; bombers and targets. More specifically, A couple of Stukas for the German player, and six ships anchored off the coast of Dunkirk. The British player has his trusty Hurricanes and a pair of Defiants with which to protect the ships. The victory conditions for the match are tied to these new elements; German player has to try to sink four of the six ships with his Stukas, while victory (however fleeting) will go to the British player at the expense of both the German player’s Stukas before they manage to complete their task.

It can be an easy thing to be distracted from strict victory conditions, especially when they don’t match your opponents. T used his Bf109s to good effect on the board, screening his bombers and getting some shots in against my aircraft, but he lagged in building his Stukas cards into his functioning deck. The bombers don’t have a Section Comms card, so they rely on the Squadron Comms to bring more Stuka action cards into the deck. But T was giddy with the power to increase his hand size through the use of the Command order, giving him more chances to shoot at my Hurricanes at the expense of his Stukas’ manoeuvrability. Now, I love the visceral pleasure of scoring a palpable hit on my opponent as much as the next grognard, but in any Undaunted game it’s important to keep your eye on the prize. In Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019), there may be some satisfaction in taking out that annoying Sniper who keeps taking pot shots at your troops, but that won’t bring you any closer to victory. So it is with Undaunted: BoB.

The moment of truth. One round had just finished, and we were waiting to see who
would be able to activate first, my Defiant or T's last Stuka.

One thing I realised in this game was how neglectful I’d been of the Defiants. Designed as a light bomber, the Defiant had no front-facing armaments, just a rear-facing hydraulic turret, albeit with a very wide traverse. It only gets one die on a shooting roll compared to the Hurricane’s two dice (having only four Browning .303 machine guns in the turret – the Hurricane had that many in each wing hardpoint), but it can shoot in any direction except forward. I’d been a bit dismissive of the Defiant in the past, so this was something I didn’t use to full advantage in our first game. Having it in front of mind this time out, I used my Defiants to much better effect, scoring at least four hits against the enemy, including the fatal blow to the second Stuka.

I think with our second outing, we’re both more aware of the need for flight cohesion between the flight teams, although having said that, by the end of the game we were both racing up Discord cards with nearly every hand.

Three down, and he had the fourth in his sights...

In the end, I held mastery of the skies over Dunkirk, as evidenced in my (unusually) superior shooting, but it was a close-run thing; before either Stuka had finally been brough down, T had sunk three of the six ships at anchor, and would have almost certainly destroyed the fourth within a couple of hands if I hadn’t been able to stop them before they reached their target, and he managed that with just two activation cards in his deck for the first two-thirds of the game; that's an impressive accomplishment. All in all, it was a very satisfying win.

 

My final tally. Claude must have brought me luck.