Ogre vs Memoir – an early consideration

In my opinion, Memoir ’44 has to be one of the best board games ever made.  I’ve been playing it pretty much every day for over two years now.  I carpool with a co-worker of mine, and he comes by early in the morning for a bit of game and coffee.  We’ve played pretty much every official scenario from every expansion, and a whole ton of unofficial scenarios from the online collection of user generated scenarios at Days of Wonder.  In fact, I have another blog all about Memoir – Memoir ’44 Fanatic.

However, for the last week we’ve switched things up a bit.  As I mentioned earlier, I got the Ogre Designers Edition a little while ago, and I’ve been trying it out.  Here are few impressions.

Ogre is only marginally more complicated than Memoir ’44, and most of that comes from the “All of mine move and shoot, then all of yours move and shoot” structure of Ogre.  Card-based wargames had not been invented in 1977.  Very few modern board game mechanics had been, in fact, which makes the ease and playability of Ogre rather remarkable.  An advantage of the Designers Edition is that the counters are absolutely enormous.  They can be rotated to designate having moved, and rotated back to show that they’ve fired, and they’re hard to knock  around on the board.

Just explaining the numbers on the counters, I realized I’d explained the game well enough to start playing.  That’s how simple it was.

The simpler scenarios play out in 20-30 minutes, just about as long as a longer battle in Memoir ’44.  That’s a definite positive as well.

One thing that is very different is the setup.  The thing that gives Memoir ’44 so much replay value is flexible map setup, with little overlay hexes for terrain that can be combined to create different battlefields.  Ogre has a number of set maps, the same as before – but they’ve made concessions to the modern gaming scene with a HUGE number of overlay ties.  Unfortunately there’s not much support for them at the moment. Then there is the unit setup.  Ogre scenarios typically give more or less flexible numbers of Armor Units to the player, which he/she can deploy in a fairly flexible manner.  Memoir specifically designates each unit’s starting position on the map.  In Memoir, given the smaller board sizes, the exact positioning of units on startup can really matter, and is critical to the balance of the map.  A few hexes here or there can make a big difference.  I don’t know if such precision in setup would make much of a difference for Ogre.

The Designer’s Edition has a very “do it yourself” feel to it, which goes with the design aesthetic of the original games.  Choose your own armies, and set them up how you will.  Play around with terrain overlays, or don’t – it’s up to you.

I’ll write more as we dig into the GEV maps and the more complicated scenarios.

Game Idea – Mega Death Tank

This is a cross between the currently-hot infinite runner genre and the old-school arcade classic Missile Command.   The theme is directly inspired/stolen directly from the Steve Jackson Games classic Ogre – soon to be re-released in the biggest board game box ever.

You control the Mega Death Tank, a massive and nearly unstoppable killing machine that’s on a suicide mission towards the enemy capital.  The enemy is going to throw everything they’ve got to stop you.  You can’t be killed directly by enemy fire, but as your armor is degraded you become more and more vulnerable to the nuclear radiation on the battlefield.

Your tank will move along on its own.  Occasionally, you might have the option to adjust course, to choose which enemy battle group to fight next or something.   The player needs to use the available weapon systems to deal with the various threats on the map.  The Mega Death Tank has several different guns – several batteries that fire tactical nuclear rounds (maybe with different sizes and ranges) and some short-range lasers, I figure.  Each weapon has a cooldown time.  The player taps a weapon, and then taps a point on the map to shoot.   Main batteries have a bit of travel time, and explode with a large radius of damage – like Missile Command.  The blast area also becomes radioactive – I suppose a color effect of some sort can show this.

Enemy tanks and whatnot have different speeds, different fire ranges, and different toughness.  Some might be killable even if they are just winged by a blast, others might only be stunned, and some might be vulnerable to radiation.  The player may be able to block the approach of some enemies using radiation as a wall – by the time the enemy units drive around, the player will have moved on. The toughest enemy tanks would be slow, but only directly killable if they’re first hit by a laser.  Stunning them for a bit might be enough to leave them in the dust, if you hit them at the right moment.

Driving into a lake might allow for repair, or radiation reduction.

This could be played with timed missions, or on infinite survival mode.   I also have an idea for a slight variation – define a travel path on a real world map, set real-world speeds to everything, and determine the mission time accordingly.  For example, your tank drives up out of the ocean in Normandy, and must drive to Paris.

Expansion DLC could have different Mega Death Tanks, different enemy units, and different maps.

This would work great as an Ogre licensed product, but could also be done independently – I’m imagining a series of battles featuring thoroughly odd sets of real-world opponents, each of which would have their own unique Mega Death Tanks, and their own distinctive mix of defending units.  India vs. Russia!  USA vs Brazil!  Japan vs. France!