Undaunted: Normandy
D-Day dream
Designer: Trevor Benjamin, David Thompson | Artist: Roland MacDonald
Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s 2018 breakthrough War Chest was wargaming boiled down to its basics: the chesslike 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, released after War Chest but in actuality the design on which the earlier game was based, is likewise an inventive hybrid, this time of deckbuilding and World War II skirmish wargames. Far more thematic than War Chest’s light medieval dressing in its multi-scenario campaign, based loosely on the real-life US 30th Infantry Division, Undaunted plays out on two fronts: the ground-level tactical board game where US and German troops vie for control of objective points, and the card game used to command those same units by gradually refining your deck full of riflemen, scouts, snipers, commanders and more.