Review: Undaunted: North Africa

By Nate Fritz

I love World War II, but I have never given the African theater as much attention as I should. Undaunted: North Africa from Osprey Games has turned my interest level up to eleven with its coverage of the fight between the British Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and the Italian Army.

The game uses a deck-building mechanic to take actions and track your soldier’s health, when you run out of cards that unit is destroyed, which leads to fast-flowing tactical combat. Maps for each scenario are designed from two-sided tiles that create a dynamic battlefield and allow for a variety of engagement scenarios. Osprey Games provides 11 scenarios with the game and has a tracker that can be used to record outcomes of each scenario in order to determine who wins a campaign.

The cards for each mission are either your deck or supply. Each turn you draw four cards from your deck to form your hand which then bids for initiative and provides your actions for that turn. Certain commanders give you options to Bolster which lets you add cards from your supply into your deck. Actions such as exploring also add Fog of War cards which represent lost chances at the action.

When playing it is key to manage not just what you have in your deck for cards but what you don’t, by using abilities to keep Fog of War cards from taking over. I found the system played very quickly after the first round and gave enough range of options and challenges that we had a few moments of analysis paralysis in trying to make the best of a bad hand.

The setup was exceptionally simple and from opening the box to playing took less than fifteen minutes. Each map’s alphanumeric label in the bottom right corner helped streamline the process.

The numbers in the center help identify any cover bonuses provided to troops within that space, the way information is on the map, and cards made for very quick combat calculation for defense ratings.

Undaunted had enough tiles and objectives that I am looking forward to a variety of engagements while working through the rest of the scenarios provided, and for the chance to play around with some homemade scenarios after that.

Here we see the Italian force tokens, each. The Scout is key in advancing across the territory as Undaunted requires you to scout tiles before being able to move into them, he also helped to remove the fog of war cards from my deck or adding them to my opponents.

The Rifleman was unique for being able to offer the control status on the territory. The Gunner though was my MVP as his firepower helped me knock out most of the opposing force and provided some key suppression to prevent the LRDG from being more successful.

The LRDG has some overlap with the Italians but brought its own style of play with options like the Engineer and Saboteur helping accomplish their unique mission. I have not had a chance to play them yet but am going to switch sides with my son for our next playthrough to see if either of us fairs better from the other side.

Scenario 1 sent players out on a mission done by the LRDG’s predecessor. Four objectives are on the map and while three of them are worth one point each one of them is worth two. This was key in my playthrough where, playing as Italy, I was able to protect two objectives but they were only worth two points in the end.

Luckily, I was able to exploit a mistake by my opponent that put him out of place and destroy all of his units, which cost him the key point. We ended in a stalemate but both felt like it was a great starting scenario for learning the system and it set us up well for the rest of our matches.

Undaunted: North Africa is a fantastic tactical wargame that is easy to pick up and knock out a round. The easy setup and great graphics made it a very enjoyable play each time it hit the table and the deck building mechanics are good.

If you are looking for a heavy system you are going to be disappointed, but for an era of continued social distancing, I found it very easy to talk both, my wife and son, into a session due to its ease of play. Now if you will excuse me, I need to find out if my friendly local game store still has any copies of Undaunted: Normandy on the shelves.