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.

Half of me it so absorbed by this that I want to try again and see if it works, see if there's a German counterpoint to work against it. The other half wants to try the other eleven scenarios in the book. That part wins. So I take it to a friend's house to play the third scenario. This involves a river, and for the first time, the sheer simplicity of Undaunted: Normandy disappoints. There are no special terrain effects for the water: it's mere decoration and it feels wrong. One point that needs making is that the scenarios don’t always feel balanced. The first scenario for example seems much easier to win as the Germans. However, I think you have to decide not to let that bug you. No scenario I have found is impossible to win as either side. If you take it in turns to play both sides through the same scenario you can challenge yourself to do better than your opponent when they were in your shoes. The scenarios are based on historical events, so of course they are not all perfectly balanced. While each card narratively represents a unique individual, mechanically they represent command logistics. The board is made up of a number of tiles peppered with objectives and troops as dictated by the scenario. To move your squads around the board you’ll have to play the appropriate cards. Rifleman A cards allow you to move the Rifleman Squad token, Scout B cards allow you to move the Scout Squad B token, and so on. Each card offers different actions and each time you play a card you can choose a single action. Right away, this creates tension.I think if you know what’s happened in Wargaming in the last 15 to 20 years – with the transition to card-driven games and COIN games that have euro inspirations – that sort of paved the way for a wargaming community that would be accepting of a light crossover game like this. And just from the general trend of games, it’s very difficult to categorise many games at this point as a eurogame, or an ameritrash game, or wargame. The hybridization of games has absolutely helped us. It straddles all the camps; the communities on both sides are primed for this kind of game already. 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. We must never forget the atrocities committed during and just before WWII by the Nazi apparatus. The Game

Undaunted Normandy is a 2 player, platoon level, light war game from Osprey Games. It’s set following the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944 and pits German and US troops across 12 scenarios. Each scenario lasting about an hour during which the two sides vie to control key objective points and fulfil the victory conditions of the scenario. Another cool thing about Undaunted is its victory system. Battles aren’t just about facing off and seeing who survives. Most encounters here are about securing (or denying) victory points, which are placed on certain tiles on the map (you can see some in the picture above, they’re the flags with “1" on them”. Each battle has been designed so that where these tokens are placed determines the flow of the battle, signalling that OK, this one’s going to be about the Germans holding that area, or that one’s going to be a mad dash to the middle of the map.

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. Designed by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson (I). Published by Osprey Games in 2019For 2 players in about 45-60 Minutes Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s 2018 breakthrough War Chest was wargaming boiled down to its basics: the chess like tradition of carefully manoeuvring units and planning moves to take your opponent’s pieces combined with modern additions of asymmetrical player armies and bag-building to determine the actions available each turn. Undaunted: Normandy tries to remind players that there were real people in this war. The cards show names of soldiers “to add to the sense that you are in command of real soldiers and not pure abstractions”, as the rulebook points out. They are not necessarily names of some of the people who actually fought in the campaigns that the game’s scenarios represent, but “have been generated from names that were common in the period and are not meant to refer to any person, living or dead.” Undaunted: Normandy cards with names In a given turn, players draw four cards before putting one up to determine initiative. This card will be discarded after the initiative phase, thereby losing players the opportunity to use it on the field. Each card has an initiative value that corresponds to their overall utility and importance. This is a crucial step as the player with initiative will play their entire hand before their opponent. Giving up a commander to go first might cripple a player’s turn, but they must judge if it is worth it to ensure they can move their squad to cover before they can be torn apart by the enemy’s machine gun.