In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini's army moved east along the Libyan coast towards Egypt, with dreams of laurel wreaths and a new Roman Empire. Every mile gained followed the road, and along that narrow ribbon of coast flowed fuel, water, men - and, everyone assumed, the war itself. Because south of the road was just blank space on the map - hundreds of thousands of square miles of sand, rock and gravel waiting to gobble up anyone foolish enough to wander too far.
Unless you're Ralph Bagnold. His "useless hobby", as he called it, was exploring the desert and learning to read sand like sailors read the sea. He invented the sun compass, worked out how to float trucks over soft sand on half-flat tyres, and learned to navigate by the stars through a terrain everyone thought was impassable. But it turned out not to be so useless in the end, as it laid the foundations for the LRDG. Not, as the initials suggest, a sexual liberation movement, but the Long Range Desert Group: British, New Zealand, Rhodesian and colonial volunteers who took the empty part of the map and made it their battlefield. While the Italian army advanced along the coast, the LRDG operated beyond it - scouting, gathering intelligence and raiding enemy positions, then disappearing back into the desert like mosquitoes, felt before they were seen.
And that's the premise of Undaunted: North Africa: an 11-scenario campaign following the LRDG on their desert raids. You and another player take control of the raiders and Italians, fighting it out across modular maps with a deck of cards representing your riflemen, machine gunners, snipers and officers. Both sides have their own units and asymmetries. The LRDG favour mobility and scouting, while the Italians get stronger defensive positions and heavier armour later on, but the asymmetry is more in their units' stats and capabilities than their playstyles, which remain broadly similar - as do their objectives.
On paper, a streamlined asymmetric skirmish wargame game that swaps dice rolls for deck-building sounds great. That promise carries over to the table too, with modular tiles that form a patchwork of crevices, scrub, rocky plains and dusty airstrips, dotted with circular tokens for troops and vehicles. It looks clean and manageable, while also suggesting plenty of tactical depth.
A Mirage of Tactical Depth
But that tactical promise is a bit misleading. The tile artwork makes you think positioning is going to matter way more than it actually does. At the start of your first game, your eyes light up at all the possibilities the map's little details seem to suggest. Do you split your force? Hold the ridge? Swing 'round the flank? Then you start playing, and realise the game doesn't give much weight to those decisions.
Instead, scenarios give you an objective and one, maybe two routes to it - neither of which are tactically very different. You're not building a plan so much as trying to execute the one the scenario has already made for you more efficiently than your opponent. Positioning boils down to distance, defence values and who gets there first, without the terrain ever really opening up different ways to approach the fight.
Scouting narrows those options even more by discouraging exploration. Your Scout determines where the rest of your force can move, since normal movement is restricted to tiles you've already scouted. Every new tile you scout adds a Fog of War card to your deck, so straying from the most direct route means clogging it with more dead weight. In practice, scouting ends up feeling more like marking out the path everyone else will follow than reconnaissance.
And the objectives themselves don't do much to shake things up. For all the visual variety the map tiles provide, at the end of the day you're going to either be capturing a tile, blowing one up, or occasionally walking a soldier off the board. Most scenarios end up feeling like the same room with the furniture rearranged. Victory often comes down to taking one or two key objectives, and since the game ends the moment you take them, there isn't much reason to worry about what happens to poor old Tommy afterwards. That can make a kamikaze sprint more worthwhile than patiently working into a stronger position.
Playing through all this, everything was so prescribed that for a while I assumed I was still in the tutorial stretch, waiting for the game to open up, but it never did. It felt like I was just following a groove someone had already carved into the sand for me.
The Battlefield Is the Deck
Part of the problem was that I'd been looking at Undaunted: North Africa as a skirmish wargame with deck-building bolted on. But really, it's a deck-builder in a skirmish wargame's clothing. Each round you draw four cards, sacrifice one to bid for initiative, and make the best of the three left. Those cards decide which soldiers can act and what they can do - move, attack, command, scout, take an objective or drive a vehicle. Your deck determines your options, while Fog of War and casualties gradually chip away at them. All this time I'd been looking to the battlefield for tactical depth that was actually coming from the cards in my hand.
Once I recalibrated and started focusing on the cards rather than the board, I started to get it.
Every soldier on the field is represented by four cards, with each hit removing one. Lose them all and they're dead, but there's an awkward limbo before that. Lose that soldier's last playable card from your hand while another is still in reserve and the soldier stays on the board, but you can't use them. First you need to play a Bolster action to put another copy into your deck, then hope you actually draw it on a later turn. Until then, that soldier is stuck and potentially in big trouble. So you're constantly thinking about how many copies you have left and whether you need to reinforce them before taking another hit.
That tension between reinforcing your force, clearing Fog of War from your deck and actually fighting with it is where most of the game's interesting decisions come from. You're not just managing the battle, but your force's ability to keep fighting, and thematically that feels right for commanding a squad under fire.
The trouble is, that tension often gives way to the feeling that your whole force is sinking into quicksand. Fog of War cards pile up in your hand like sand in your boots. Your driver takes a hit, stopping the vehicle dead, so you shuffle someone else into the driver's seat. They get hit too, and suddenly you're playing musical chairs with the crew as your opponent picks the vehicle apart one man at a time. Meanwhile, the cards you need elsewhere aren't turning up either, and bit by bit your whole force starts to bog down. It's especially bad in scenarios that use most of your roster, where a bigger deck means more cycling and more draws that give you exactly the cards you didn't need.
A Weak Hand
Aside from that, the deck-building, and particularly the combat, feels a bit vanilla. You have troops geared towards shooting vehicles and troops geared towards shooting soldiers, while some can trade the chance of causing a casualty for a better chance of suppressing the enemy. But beyond that, combat mostly comes down to how many dice each weapon lets you roll. There's some synergy through command cards, like the Inspire action that allows you to replay a card you've just played, but none between the combat cards themselves.
Because each new hand effectively resets your options, there's no real thread from one turn to the next, just the cards you're given and how best to use them. And with that hand dictating which units you can activate, it's difficult to coordinate them or build any momentum on the battlefield. It's a bit strange thematically too: as a commander, why would you be ordering your Scout around while the soldiers in the thick of the fighting are pinned down waiting for orders
It's all very functional, just not particularly engaging. More meaningful synergies to build towards, greater mechanical variety between the combat units, or more distinct playstyles between the factions might have been enough to win me over.
It's an intriguing mix of genres and mechanics, and there are things it gets right. It's a clever design that's nicely streamlined and easy to learn, with some interesting decisions in managing your deck and keeping your crew in the fight. Ultimately, though, I found the deck-building more tedious than fun, and the skirmish side feels like it's on rails. Too many important moments come down to drawing the right cards or getting lucky with the dice, and the game also has a habit of bogging down just when it should be getting interesting. All of this is compounded by a presentation that promises something grander and more exciting than the game actually delivers.
By the tenth scenario, my wife and I had sunk so deep into the quicksand, or rather our chairs, that neither of us could be bothered to play the last one. We'd fought ten battles in the desert but we no longer cared who would win the war. Bagnold spent years proving the empty part of the map was worth exploring, but by then, I wasn't so sure.
