Borg Game Geek

Today saw a welcome return to Richard Borg's card driven Commands and Colors (sic) style war-gaming. Crabro and I have logged something like 80 games of Ancients and its expansions and have also played a few games of Battle Cry but this was our first session with the D-Day-commemorating Memoir '44. We were very happy to be returning to this type of game (albeit the origin of my "I whinged for Carthage T-shirt) even though we were aware that the older Memoir did not have some of the complexities of Commands and Colors: Ancients.

The game is highly reminiscent of those invented by myself and a friend in our teens, utilising our OO scale Airfix soldiers and a board borrowed from another game. These had started with the use of a Cluedo board which we decided could represent streets and buildings rather than rooms and corridors. Over some months these games evolved into large scale American Civil War battles played on a 3D landscape constructed using an assortment of model railway accessories, Plasticine, small building blocks and other items borrowed from my little brother's toy collection. Naturally it is Battle Cry which is the greatest reminder of this era but the miniature soldiers in Memoir are also highly evocative of those early teenage days.

Today we played the first two scenarios: Pegasus Bridge (an introductory scenario using only infantry) and Sainte Maire Eglise which introduced a tank unit and different terrain.

Things went downhill for me after winning the first battle as the Allies but I did manage to keep the return match on the Pegasus scenario to 4-3. After lunch Crabro's parachutists managed to dig themselves in along a perfect defensive line in woods, villages etc and my little Feldgrau failures were trapped in a pocket and massacred. The reverse of the scenario did not see me repeat Crabro's success with the initial "parachute drop" and after some limited success my hand (consisting as it did of only left flank cards) went against me, allowing the Panzer unit on my right flank which I had been so desperately trying to take out, to mop up the remaining necessary units without serious opposition.

The usual whinging about cards and Crabro's legendary dice rolling aside, it was great fun to return to this type of game and I think we are both very much looking forward to some more before perhaps moving on to Borg's later and more complex game: Battlelore.

To finish the day we added some new expansions into Jambo and just to be consistent I lost again. In a game rather characterised by debate about the correct use of various new cards, Crabro motored to a comfortable win by taking all four of the new Relic cards.