Dangermouse wrote:
I noticed Memoir '44 in your collection. What is your opinion? Worth getting? I ask because I like the Ticket to Ride series a lot and was wondering what you thought of Days of Wonder's take on a war-type board game.
Short answer: It's fun but it doesn't have a lot of tactical or strategic depth.
Longer answer (and brief explanation of the game): The game has a bunch of plastic models representing: infantry, tanks, artillery, and a few (German) super tanks. The map is a hex grid that's divided into 3 areas that are also subdivided into a left and a right. There's a victory point track for both sides (and both sides usually have the same points goal, barring scenario included handicaps). Each side also has a set of custom dice, and a deck and hand of cards. Your turns consist of playing a card then doing what the card tells you to. Cards will generally have some flavor text and then tell you a section that you can activate, and how many units you can move in that section. I.E. "Scout" move and attack with one unit in both the left and right section of the center zone. Attacks are straight forward. Infantry rolls three dice (iirc) when attacking units adjacent to itself, it rolls one less dice for each hex the target is away from you, and one less dice if the target is hiding in certain types of terrain. Tanks roll 3 dice for all hexes in range (minus a dice for terrain considerations). Artillery rolls 3 dice for the first four spaces, 2 dice for the next four 1 dice for the last four and ignores terrain. Assigning wounds is easy, if the symbol of the target unit comes up that unit takes a hit, there's also a wild symbol (grenade) which counts as a hit, and finally a flag (retreat) that forces the target unit to move backwards one space. Infantry symbols appear twice on each dice, so (including the wild) there are 3 hits when shooting at infantry, tanks have 1 symbol + 1 wild on the dice, and artillery only get hit by the wild. Super tanks are the hardest to kill, as you need to re-roll any hits you get, and only grenades count for the second roll. Your units are represented by between 1-4 plastic models of their type, casualties are recorded by removing a figure from the unit, when all the figures in one group are gone, the entire unit is killed and the player who killed it place a figure on his/her score track to record a point for the kill. The game is an interesting combination of hand management and tactical combat, terrain concerns, hp left things of that nature. It really shines if you get the extra board though. There's a "Supreme Commander" variant, where one player plays each of the three zones, and the supreme commander selects cards for each zone. It can be a bit painful if you're not getting very good cards for your zone; but it's still a lot of fun to have 3 other people razzing you or cheering your dice rolls. Game time was about an hour to an hour and a half. Complaints and quibbles I have,when a unit you own is damaged it still rolls the same number of dice in the attack; also the cards in your hand drive most of your decision making.
It's a good game for people that don't do a lot of wargaming, but veterans of many a table top game may find it too simple for them. It's very easy to get new players into this, teaching time was about 15 minutes. Most of the rules are pretty simple, and after a game or two I didn't even need to reference the rule book.
I prefer Tide of Iron, which has a bit more wargame-y feel. The rules are a more complicated, and when you take casualties your units' shooting profiles change. There's also valleys and ridges and all kinds of interesting terrain effects that Memoir 44 doesn't have. The unfortunate thing about tide of Iron is how long it takes to learn, as a consequence of all the rules. It took me 2 play-throughs as well as a 30 min rules explanation to really get it.
So back to Memoir '44 it's a very good game for beginners to the wargaming genre. It's light, I've never needed to check the rule book, the player aid cards that come with the game are good at covering most rule interactions. You can actually play with more than 2, in some variants (you may need to have gotten an extra board? In battle lore you needed one in Memoir it may come with enough). The downside is it's very luck driven, as opposed to other wargames, where you have various sorts of armor, or infantry saves. Memoir is very approachable and easy to learn, but it removes some of the interesting choices that sometimes come up in other more complicated war games. I had the medieval version of this (Battle Lore) and it got plenty of plays until I got Tide of Iron, now Battle Lore only comes out when I'm teaching people that are new to the genre. So my opinion on getting Memoir, as a game it's quite fun, but as a War Game it leaves a bit to be desired, and if you aren't a war gamer (as I wasn't for a long time) it's really got very few downsides.
[After preview but before submit;] after looking around, the expansion that lets you play with more than two is called Operation Overlord and doesn't come with the base set. The place where I found that /
http://www.daysofwonder.com/memoir44/en/ also has an online play function so you can get a feel for the game.[/Apbbs]