Undaunted (Normandy & Battle of Britain) - Design Impressions
I really want to like Undaunted Normandy, and something I’ve finally realized after about five sessions ending in a vague sense of dissatisfaction - the scenarios are too short! On paper, the design is great. I love every system and how they engage with one another, but after every game I’d think “well.. I don't know, that was fine I guess”, and I think scenario length is why.
For a game with a lot of randomness, it can really favor one player over the other before things average out over a long enough time, and the scenarios usually end too soon to see this happen. There's not as much deck cycling as other deckbuilding games, and tied with dice rolls I have seen a lot of runs of luck. Which is fine! I don't mind that necessarily, but it felt like a short run of luck would end the game much sooner than was ideal.
Separately I frequently felt like I was not really engaging with the deckbuilding aspect itself, and certainly never to a point where I assembled the ideal deck to achieve my objective. Typically I’d buy a couple of cards, lose a couple of cards from combat, and then the scenario would be over.
Ultimately, the scenarios (in the first half of Normandy anyway which may be the issue here) never felt like an interesting struggle that we were a part of. One of us got a little lucky, built a momentum, and completed it.
Anyway after realizing this I bought Battle of Britain and I am liking it a lot more. There’s some more interesting decision to be made in just how you move around the map, and combat requires a bit more setup and payoff than just constantly rerolling Riflemen in Normandy. Anyway that's it - the game is great! I want to play it for longer!!