BoardGameGeek News

...or would you prefer to go with something totally crazy with a scale/scope change, like re-working the soldiers as planes and creating a Battle of Britain type game where you command a squadron of aircraft?

For future games, on account that Normandy, North Africa, and Stalingrad will exist, I would love to do something a bit different, so Battle of Britain seems like a great fit.

Gents, we're ready to show you the core gameplay concept we've developed for Undaunted: Battle of Britain. The concept is that the players play elements of the RAF and Luftwaffe from Dunkirk through the Blitz. Each unit = 1 plane, so players are controlling about six aircraft each in a typical scenario. We've included a couple screenshots from the most recent test (RAF fighters trying to stop BF 110C's bombing key targets, while they are defended by BF 109E/Fs).

Thematically, the game could follow the members of a single Soviet platoon, moving throughout the city. Mechanically, we could add...a sort of persistent state / pseudo-legacy thing. (The player)...saves their deck across games. Maybe?

Trevor and I have discussed what Undaunted 3 might look like. We both really like the idea of Undaunted: Eastern Front or Undaunted: Stalingrad. It would introduce the Soviets, and concentrate on urban and close quarters combat. It would also introduce more vehicles, etc.

Essen 2019 discussion: What should an Undaunted legacy game have?

Same core gameplay as other Undaunted titles
Unlock new capabilities
Soldiers get better (upgrades)
Perma-death
Perma-board state changes
Normandy (rather than North Africa) scale
Can't change combat rolls (needs to be the same basic dice rolling system)
Can't change deck-building (though we discussed that same scenarios could use constructed decks)
Core concept is supply manipulation over time
Secret objectives
Secret supply
Obfuscate end of campaign scoring

Timeline:
UKGE 2020: initial design concept complete
March/April 2021: design work complete

• Soldier cards are double-sided. The front shows the soldier as a "recruit" — basic abilities and stats — and the reverse shows them as a "veteran" — extra abilities, improved stats, etc. The extra abilities vary both across units (Scouts have different options than Rifleman) and within units (one Rifleman within Squad A may have a sub-machine gun, while the other gets anti-tank gun).
• Between scenarios, you get to "promote" some of the soldiers in your deck, flipping them from their recruit to their veteran side.
• This will likely be done at a fixed rate (e.g., three cards per player per scenario), but it could be tweaked based on what happened in the scenario (e.g. hidden objectives, who won, etc.).
• For now at least, we think this is done randomly from the cards in your deck when the game ends (i.e., those which have taken part in this fight) (cf. Casualties, which is also random)
• Command cards are double-sided and can be flipped, too, but this only happens through scenario/narrative.

A core (if not the core) change is that effects can persist throughout the campaign. If soldiers are killed, they are permanently removed from your supply. If soldiers are promoted/upgraded, they permanently gain new abilities. If a building is destroyed, it permanently drops in defense value and blocks vehicle movement. That sort of thing.

In Essen we discussed using custom stickers and/or pens to handle this persistence. So Stalingrad would be a proper one-shot Legacy game. We wonder, though, if this is necessary. We've come up with a model which, we believe, allows us to maintain the persistence but avoid the permanence, making the game perfectly re-playable. See attached. We feel this is a much more attractive proposition for players. They can have their cake and eat it too — or rather, eat it again and again!

I argued the most vehemently for legacy, and I think it was largely based on making sure that everything felt weighty and full of consequence. We really wanted losing soldiers to have an emotional dimension.

However, the reasons we changed were (a) enough people, including playtesters, were asking for a replayable option, and we came up with the option of swapping out tiles and cards, and that was literally cheaper to produce than legacy, also (b) the richest legacy aspects of Stalingrad aren't the big, dramatic changes of, say, Pandemic Legacy, where there's one big rule change or dramatic betrayal, but lots of small, incremental changes. Stickering a card is fun — stickering half a deck is a chore; ripping up a card is dramatic — ripping up tens of cards feels wasteful.

The player takes the role of a "commander" and has a deck of maybe 20 or so cards representing their fighters. At the beginning of the game, the player shuffles their entire deck together. There is also an opposition deck of cards. The goal is to remove the entire opposition deck from the game. On a player's turn, they draw X cards from their deck (probably four or five) and X cards from the opposition deck. The goal is to remove the drawn opposition cards. Each opposition card has a defense value (and some sort of attack or special action).

Each of the player's cards has up to three elements:
• Attack value
• Special action
• Special action that requires the card to be removed from the game

I envision there being a few (maybe four or five?) "levels" to the game, which consist of thematic concepts and escalating difficulty in the composition of the opponent deck. Theoretically the idea could be that players play through a chronological campaign of these handful of scenarios.

So I think this could maybe fit what you've laid out as well. Each maquis card has a "minimal risk" plain-clothes action that is less powerful, and a "high risk" militarized action that is powerful.

Instead of a single, amorphous deck for the enemies, what about this: In addition to the enemy deck, each game has a prescribed set of "location" cards that are laid out on the table. These would minimally have a "defender" value, though they could also have special abilities / conditions. During set-up, you distribute the enemy cards face down to the locations, according to this defender value (so three cards if the value is 3, etc.) On the player's turn, they draw their hand and then choose which location to attack.

In Sniper Elite, the game board represents an operation-size area where the map is broken into different size spaces, with more spaces in land use types that are harder to shoot through. The map will be designed to offer both long chains of spaces for snipers to take advantage of long shots across the map, and busy clusters of sectors where the hunters can feel relatively safe because of the difficulty of the shot. Control of the spaces is key to the hunters' victory as they limit where the sniper can operate.

To successfully make a shot, a sniper must draw a number of success tokens from the shot resolution bag greater than or equal to the number of spaces between the sniper and their target, including the space that the target is in, but not including the space that the sniper is in. The sniper may draw any number of tokens from the bag, but they must announce how many they are drawing and then must complete their draw even after gaining the needed number of successes.

In addition to success tokens, the bag also contains blanks, noise tokens, and noise suppression tokens. If a sniper draws two or more noise tokens, they must place a marker on the space the sniper occupied when they took the shot. Noise suppression tokens cancel noise tokens. A sniper begins the game with 5 success, 3 noise, and 2 miss tokens in the bag. After completing an objective, the sniper adds a noise token; after killing a soldier, they add a success token; after killing an officer, they add a noise-cancel token. The sniper can never have more than 10 success tokens in the bag.

Here's the basic picture: There are no cards directly mapped to vehicles. Instead, vehicles are objects on the board which soldiers (Scouts, MGs, etc.) can use. Each vehicle has one or more positions: Driver, Gunner, Radio, etc. Soldiers spend an action to enter a vehicle, picking an unoccupied position in it. They can then spend a card to perform the action associated with that position — move, attack, etc. — or to leave the vehicle, or to switch positions. I have some more ideas around vehicle damage/repair, cover bonuses, and around position-based bonuses/restrictions (some soldiers could be better drivers than others), but that is the basic picture. It's super flexible, not too complex, and it allows us to maintain our thematic, narrative focus on the soldiers.