I won a copy of Memoir 'Long Time Ago (aka Battle of Hoth) today at Wellycon! It was the only thing I played from the Play To Win table and, as someone who has ignored Star Wars since the prequel trilogy, I’m not sure I’d even have picked up the box were it not for Anticipated games - #917 by COMaestro which caused the title to ring a bell for me. I could immediately see what it was from the picture on the back of the box, so I grabbed it and set up the first scenario at a table and, as fortune would have it (as it’s been a while since I’ve played Memoir), someone turned up who knew the system better than myself (and who had already bought Battle of Hoth but hadn’t had a chance to play it, so was super keen). We quickly agreed to reject the first scenario (which has only infantry on each side), and set up a scenario with more variety.
The scenario had the rebels trying to locate a downed enemy ship and transmit data, and the empire sending in swarms of troops to prevent that from happening – in this mission, every eliminated empire unit comes back (following an intervening turn without them) as reinforcements at the edge of the map. So the rebels are trying to get the job done before they’re completely overwhelmed.
Per M44 tradition we played it both ways, and on balance either we drew or else I took a narrow win (I know that they beat me 5 to 4 when I played as the rebels in the second round, but I can’t remember whether they’d had 3 or 4 medals to my 5 when I won the first round playing the empire).
The damned AT-AT nearly ruined me in the second game. It only takes one hit to take it down, but you’re only rolling potential hits with the initial dice, and then you re-roll any of those potential successes to see if you succeed again. I attacked it with three units, rolling a total of nine dice, with 4 or 5 potential hits, and never got the result I needed on the re-roll. I wasted one additional turn trying to eliminate it, before giving it up as a lost cause.
(In hindsight, this was not an improbable outcome. There’s a 1/3 chance of a potential hit (two of the die faces qualify), but only a 1/6 chance of a re-roll doing the damage. So… if it needs (on average) 6 re-rolls to get the desired result, then we’d need (on average) to be rolling 18 dice initially!? Which I’m sure is more than I expended on it in total. I can only imagine how good it must feel when, with nothing better to do with a card, you take a single-die punt at one of those things and actually manage to take it down!)
Another fun feature of this version is the “leaders” – each side includes 3 leaders, each of which provides 3 powerful cards, and you choose one of those sets to add to your deck. With team play, each player has their own leader, so will have the opportunity to do uniquely powerful things.
First impressions were great. If you like Star Wars and you like the Command and Colours system, I reckon this is well worth a look. Do note that it’s a stripped-back version of the system when compared to even the base game of M44, with a smaller map and only three unit types each. I don’t think this is a bad thing – that size and simplicity makes for a very quick play time, which feels to me like a nice alternative – I was delighted to bring it home with me! YMMV though.
And here’s an enthusiastic review from a C&C superfan if that’s of interest.
(I would also be stunned if there are not lots of expansions and scenarios planned to increase the options; and their approach to allowing for larger maps is that the flip-side of the board forms half of a double-sized map for “epic” scenarios using two copies of the game (but only one epic scenario is included in this base set). Pretty sure they’re going to milk this for all it’s worth! And it’ll provide a good gateway to other C&C for many players, no doubt.)
