Yesterday I played three scenarios of Undaunted: Normandy with my teenage son. For both of us it was the first time playing the game. And, different to several other games, my son seemed to have fun for real - not only to shut ME up.
The game is really easy to learn, the system feels quite elegant, if also pretty luck-of-the-draw-based. But yeah, that was enjoyable.
Which games did you play over the weekend? What yould you recommend for a 15yo typical teenager offspring?
My son is 12, and hasn’t expressed any interest in Undaunted. But he really enjoys Aeon’s End and Warhammer Invasion. WH:I is going to hard to find. Aeon’s End is a co-op deckbuilder, that’s pretty thinky and really leans into the coop aspect of things.
Oh! Never heard of it, but its a deckbuilder which I love as a game mechanic. Is it similar to star realms as a duel deckbuilder?
Disclaimer: Never played Star Realms, but I assume it is very similar to Hero Realms.
And no, it’s not similar at all. There is a lot of stuff added on top in Undaunted that makes it not a deck builder in the primary sense. You move your troops around on the battlefield; positioning, cover and distance are as impactful as the stats on the troops cards. Also there are only a handful of different card types - scout, gunner, machine gunner, sniper and mortar. All cards of a type are technically identical.
You could think of the deck as both your “health bar” and your available options per round.
Each troop token on the battlefield is represented by several cards in your deck (the soldiers that compose that troop). If your enemy hits, you discard one of those cards from the unit they hit. If you can’t do that any longer, you remove the token from the battlefield.
Also the cards dictate the options you can do per turn, such as move, fire, taking cover etc. That means if you don’t pull the “bravo scout” card, you can’t use the bravo scout token this round.
Summarizing: Undaunted is a great - snappy, easy, elegant, but also deep - “dudes on a map” game. But if you expect “only” a deck builder, you would have the wrong picture.
Thank you so much for the overview. I shall have a look at it. While I love deckbuilding, I much prefer when this is embedded into something else. Clank is a good example taking the concept of a deckbuilder further. However, some others like Aeons-End I did not enjoy that much. Same with Battle for Hogwarts. I have yet to find a good coop deckbuilder and prefer the duel/ competitive versions so far.
Take a look at Dead Reckoning and Edge of Darkness. Both combine deckbuilding with other aspects. Also notable: Cubitos and Heat
