Game Preview/Review: Memoir ‘44: Campaign Book, Volume 1

By W. Eric Martin
February 24, 2009

Designer: Richard Borg, with Malcolm Green, Jacques David and Don Clarke
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Players: 2
Ages: 8
Playing Time: Varies
Release Date: February 2009
Price: $30
Links:

I’m sure most people are familiar with the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In one version of the story, Buddha leads a group of blind men into an enclosure with an elephant and allows each of them to touch a different part of the creature. “What is an elephant like?” asks Buddha. “What is its nature?” The man who examined only the leg compares an a elephant to a tree, while the one who touched only the ear compares an elephant to a palm tree, and so forth. Nature is deceptive, we learn, as we often experience only part of our surroundings and thereby acquire an incomplete picture of the world, an observation that should always be at the forefront of one’s mind before issuing blanket statements about this or that.

The elephant parable comes to mind as I set out to review Memoir ‘44: Campaign Book, Volume 1 because while I’ve played eight times – that is, completed eight scenarios – I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the book contains. I’m holding a ropy tail and trying to describe the entire beast in detail…

From Battle to War

The main difference between the scenarios presented in the Memoir ‘44 base game and in the Campaign Book is that the former are discrete events – battles that are played twice, with the players switching sides to give them a feel for both sides of the conflict – while the latter are linked together in series that are based on particular theaters of operation from World War II. The players don’t capriciously switch sides to experience life on the other side of the battlefield; they choose a side – Axis or Allies – and stick with it for three scenarios, or a half-dozen, or more than twenty.

The three theaters of operation, dubbed “Grand Campaigns,” are Battle of Normady (June-August 1944), Unternehmen Fall Greb (May-June 1940) and Operation Barbarossa (June-December 1941), and each of these theaters is composed of several campaigns of linked scenarios. (Confusingly, Grand Campaigns are also referred to in the rules as campaigns.)

The Battle of Normandy, for example, starts with a campaign called “Flanking Caen,” which consists of four scenarios. In the manner of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, your path through the scenarios and the campaigns might depend on the outcome of the previous game. If the Allies win Flanking Caen, the next campaign is “Taking Caen”; otherwise the next campaign is “The Breakout.” The first campaign in Operation Barbarossa resembles a flowchart as the order of the scenarios to be played, in addition to which scenarios will be played, is determined by who wins the previous scenario. Thus, while the grand campaigns are based on historical events, players can rewrite history by being more (or less) competent than their real-life counterparts.

In 2007, Days of Wonder tied together many parts of the Memoir ‘44 world with the Air Pack expansion, which included a revised summary card deck and a giant scenario book that revised and catalogued previously released scenarios. The Campaign Book leans on this expansion for support in two ways. First, while only one of the campaigns requires the Air Pack, all of them have rules for how to add air power to the scenarios. Second, nine previously published scenarios have been incorporated into two of the campaigns (Normandy and Barbarossa), sticking them into the appropriate points in time, as it were, to fit them into a larger context.

While the idea of linking the scenarios this way is interesting, I would have preferred that the scenarios be reprinted in the book rather than merely referred to. Of course the Fall Greb and Barbarossa campaigns require materials from the Terrain Pack and Eastern Front expansions, so you’ll be delving into multiple boxes anyway to pull out the appropriate figures, hexes, chits, and summary cards. Having to pack and unpack multiple boxes to find all the right bits would drive me crazy, but thankfully one of my playtest partners was up to the job, leaving me to do other things.

Big Mo’

Aside from determining the order of campaigns and scenarios, the results of each scenario often have other, smaller consequences on future games, the details of which are included in the text box of each scenario listing. When my Axis forces got smoked in “Securing the Flank,” the first scenario in Flanking Caen, I lost my artillery unit in the next scenario. The Allies and Axis have separate flowcharts, and only the text box on the victor’s flowchart takes effect. For a particular scenario in the Fall Gelb Grand Campaign, for example, an Allied victory gives them two turns in a row in the next scenario before the Germans take one, while an Axis victory gives the Germans a conditional ability to ignore flags in the next scenario. (In BattleLore terms, they’re bold when next to two adjacent friendly units.)

Momentum in battle is also brought into play through victory event rolls, which take place prior to each scenario in a campaign after the first. Each player rolls two dice, plus one die for each scenario he’s won so far: Roll infantry, and the opponent must remove one figure from an infantry unit; roll a flag, and one opponent’s unit must retreat; roll a star, and he starts with one fewer Command card; and so forth. All the effects are cumulative, so the starting forces in the later scenarios will look vastly different each time that you play, based both on prior experience and the results of the previous scenarios. The text boxes of the campaign flowchart can also modify these victory event rolls, as when I lost the second scenario in Flanking Caen, thereby allowing my opponent to ignore any tanks in my subsequent victory events roll. (As you might gather, my Memoir fu is weak.)

Another element that ties together the scenarios in a particular campaign are reserve tokens. Each side starts with some number of reserve tokens, with the sides not being equal to represent historical reality. After setting up the board, players roll two dice, and based on the results, they can spend reserve tokens to add infantry, tanks or artillery to the board – possibly Elite forces depending on what they roll. Forces can be added to the baseline of the gameboard in order to be deployed from turn one or kept in the staging area off the board, in which case you’d need to spend a Command card in the future to get tem on the board. The appeal of holding back the troops is twofold: You can bring them onto the board in any Section, depending on your Command card, and if you win the scenario while the unit is still in the staging area, you keep the reserve token for a future scenario. As with victory event rolls and the victory text on the flowchart, being able to decide which reserves to pull into a scenario helps customize the playing experience and build on past results – not that I was any more successful in a second try at “Securing the Flank,” mind you.

Finally, each campaign has a chart for each player to track objectives achieved, and a player will gain (or lose) points based on his success across all the scenarios. Any points scored from the objective track are added to a player’s total number of metals scored across the entire campaign. If you play only a single campaign, the player with the higher total wins; in the context of a grand campaign, the person with the higher total scores 1-3 points depending on the margin of victory. These Grand Campaign points are summed after all the campaigns have been played in order to see who prevailed in the Grand Campaign.

A Million Little Pieces

In addition to being a book of scenarios, the Campaign Book includes a small sheet of chits with the aforementioned reserve tokens as well as a few items used in particular scenarios: an anti-tank gun, mortar, smoke screen, landing craft, abatis and tokens for Brandenburger commandos. Summary cards for the appropriate items are also included to further fatten the summary deck from the Air Pack expansion. I have a hard time remembering all the niggling details of each type of terrain and troop, so the inclusion of new goodies is a good news/bad news deal from my point of view. For those dreaming about an armor breakthrough action, however, that day has finally arrived.

In the end, I can’t begin to wrap my arms around the elephantine offering that is the Campaign Book. The number of new scenarios is huge, and the ways that they both combine into larger campaigns and change with each play should provide any Memoir fan with months worth of new playing material. And should you, in fact, tire of running through the campaigns – digging long ruts through the Russian countryside – you have the implied promise of that little number “1” in the title that more will come in the future.

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