Undaunted: Reinforcements

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Following the wildly popular and award-winning Undaunted: Normandy and Undaunted: North Africa from the talented Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson, we are proud toannounce the arrival of our new expansion - Undaunted: Reinforcements.Fans have been asking for new content, four-player and solo modes as well as somewhere to store their cards. Never fear - Reinforcements have arrived! 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. WWII fetishism is a lingering turd clinging to the ass of Boomer America. Younger generations have inherited this turd from aging and now elderly gamers. It’s time to cut it loose and move on. Virtually all of the really interesting, compelling, and successful war games of the past decade + have either NOT been about WWI or about some underexplored niche subtopic.

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. Many fans of Undaunted would argue that the biggest addition Reinforcements brings is an official solo system for the game. When we discussed the idea of adding a solo system of the game with Osprey, we told them that we'd prefer not to design it ourselves. (Trevor hasn't had much experience in designing solitaire systems, and David prefers to design games to be solitaire from the beginning rather than adapting a solo system to a multiplayer game.) 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. I think you are right- WWII still sells for some godforsaken reason and without greater specificity the game may as well be red versus blue. But I’d like that better, because then I don’t have to be the Nazis or think about Nazis or watch Nazis win the game. But generally speaking, it’s driven by a system where you take a set of cards that are specific to the units in the scenario – so if you’re playing scenario four in Undaunted: Normandy, you’re going to go find the AI for each individual unit for scenario four. In most scenarios, scouts are trying to do basically the same thing, so the scout AI card might be the same for scenarios four through nine, for example.TB: I think it does the right job of adding that extra bit for people who are familiar with it. And it brings in a new community of people who specifically wanted a solo experience. So it’s the definitive solo mode. From the beginning, there’s been lots of community, homegrown solo versions, but I guarantee you that none of the ones out there have put as much effort into what Digby and Turczi and Anthony put into this. Had my regular Cthulhu Wars crew over today. We usually try to start with something else (we've been playing a fair amount of Tiny Epic Crimes lately) and when talking about a couple other games, I... Four player mode works by giving the third and forth players fewer cards but ultimately is a simple re-hashing of the main game, I’ve only had one opportunity to try it and it didn’t overcomplicate or elongate the scenario too much and it felt like a nice optional addition should the chance to play with four arises. Finally Anthony Howgego and Filip Hartelius (Osprey's game development team) were responsible for transforming David Digby's design concepts into an elegant card system. The end result is the "Enemy Unknown" system of playing Undaunted solitaire, a system that when combined with Normandy and North Africa allows you to play either faction in 31 different scenarios for 62 total different solo play experiences!

DT: One thing we should say, just to give credit where credit’s due, is that Dávid Turczi designed the original concept of the solo system, but I think the vast, vast majority of the work that was done, was done by David Digby. He basically did all of the scenario development, and Anthony Howgego, who is a developer at Osprey, did a ton of the development on it, too. David Thompson: For the eight new scenarios we’re adding, you can play each of those two-player or four-player. But the solo play is a little bit out of control. It’s literally every single scenario from Normandy, every single scenario from North Africa, plus the eight new scenarios. And you can play each one as either side [US vs. Germans, or Italians vs. British]. So there’s 62 ways to play solo, and every one of those is tailored to the scenario.

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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. 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. The biggest change of this expansion must be the solo mode. Armour and Armament, Under the Cover of Night, and Friendly Fire all kind of add in things you’ve already seen. Sure, there are new units and scenarios, but it’s nothing that feels wholly different from the core games. It’s more content that you’ve already come to know and love. I mean, I’ll take it, but it’s not the star of the show. The AI card will handle the enemy’s tactics for solo play. Undaunted: Reinforcements can be used with both Undaunted: Normandy and Undaunted: North Africa. In it are five modular expansions that can be used together or mix and matched as necessary.

So on the Reinforcements Normandy side, each tank is a single unit on the board, and each card is one of the crewmen. It’s abstract, but essentially each of the cards can perform all of the actions of the tank. We haven’t specialised the crewmen cards. 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.

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Trevor and I aren’t that familiar with this. My general stance on solo design is if I’m working on a solo game, I like it to be solo from the start. And if it’s a multiplayer game that we worked on, then I feel way more comfortable with somebody that has the skills of turning a multiplayer game into a solitaire game, which is a skill set I don’t have. 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. 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. DT: One thing that also helped us, I think, is that Duncan Malloy [who signed the game to Osprey Games] actually commissioned Undaunted: North Africa before Normandy was ever even released. So Trevor and I have worked on Undaunted games two years out. We were done with the design for North Africa before Undaunted: Normandy released. Having that prepped and ready to within a year of Normandy being well received and released, I think that helped, too.

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 only one or the other, you'll be able to play Undaunted for the first time in a four-player mode, or test your mettle in a solo mode by Dávid Turczi and David Digby. The Undaunted series of games are asymmetric World War 2 games, which up until this expansion was a two player affair based on historical battles from both Normandy and North Africa and have been praised for their mechanics and gameplay. Reinforcements is a modular expansion that requires one (or both) of those two games to play, offers additional scenarios and units for both games, a four player variant and solo rules to play every scenario from both games plus the new ones. Wait, that’s not all! It also contains a handy size storage box which accommodates both original games plus the expansion. But first, there’s a production note that needs adding here. The box for Reinforcements is exactly what this reviewer personally wants for expansions. The box is a little bit taller on the same footprint, but has exactly the right amount of room to contain all of the new stuff, plus the entire previous two games. It comes with dividers and slots for literally everything. While this is a very small thing in the grand scheme of a review, simply having Osprey offer this as the new box option, freeing your shelves up, is a gift. 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.This is where things get weird. The bot has no options that give it an effective reaction to my inept display. What it still has is a lot of machine-gun cards that spring into action, suppressing my remaining counters. In turn, all I can do is unsuppress them and take the odd pot-shot, hoping for a hit. The scenario bogs down into a repetitive stalemate and I give up, handing the win to the bot as it controls the most objectives. The casualties on each side are murderous. Pre-pub link is up, and the game is getting great numbers to start. https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1083-wings-for-the-baron-deluxe-gmt-edition.aspx Reinforcements is a treasure trove for Undaunted players, with new cards, scenarios, and game modes to explore. Whether it’s the subtle, yet potent asymmetry of the new specialists for Normandy, the elegant translation of the game for four players, or the richness of the solo mode, this is a real box of delights." - Filip Hartelius, Osprey Games 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. 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?