Memoir’44 started as pretty simple and short game of Commands & Colors origin – 3 units, no battle back, 4-5 victory banners scenarios. However, with the time Days of Wonder did a great job developing the game, adding the expansions and building on great ides of Mr Borg.

For me the epic culmination of this is the series called “D-Day Landings” featuring monstrous maps (six of them – one for each Overlord 1944 beach) to play which you would need 12 players. Fortunately, there are smaller scenarios – 1, 2 or 3 beaches combined. I had already a great pleasure playing Utah+Omaha as well as Utah Beach + American Airborne. This time we planned on playing the British sector, namely combined Juno and Gold beaches:

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We rolled for the sides and I took Germans while Lukasz (Overall Commander) and Konrad managed the UK/Allies. The situation of Axis on above map is pretty dire – really, not much units, but they have 3 big guns (each 2 points to UK when destroyed) and couple of bunkers which might give the Allies some resistance!

Let us see what happened on below picture:

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  1. The Allies started with quite impetus, taking the most western part of Gold beach. Really, the Axis could not withstand the attack…
  2. However, the center of June beach was not so fortunate and the bloody battle ensued. The center bunker took the biggest burden of fight, while the left-most one (with machine gun) provided covering fire for defenders. Still, thanks to the artillery barrage Allies dispatched one of the Big Guns in single volley.
  3. The Gold beach success was followed up with annihilating of the second trench line and bringing forces toward one of the Big Guns. It will be interesting contest as you will see…
  4. My reinforcements rolls were crap. First 5-6 turns i rolled so badly I received none. However, I had two companies of reinforced tanks from the start (but at the baseline hexes), which in the end arrived at the Juno beach. Thanks to them, they later called it “bloody beach”… The wrought a real havoc, scoring tons of points but in the end they succumbed to the prevailing Allies numbers…
  5. The center saw another heroic struggle of single German bunker denying whole UK division access. Those guys were simply great, scoring 3 banner single-handed.
  6. In the end Allies managed to make some progress on Juno beach. It was at the cost of huge losses however.
  7. The Gold beach streak of UK successes come to the end when they tried to take down entrenched Bog Gun. They lost 3 units and most of willingness to fight. The game ended.

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That was intense fight, where units were dying one by one. In the end. Allies occupied 5 out of 6 beaches, killed 1 out of 3 big guns and took 3 out of 4 bunker. However, they suffered tremendous losses in the process which resulted in final score 25 to 18 for Axis and their victory.

As a last note. The board for D-Day Landing are really huge. A lot of inventive thinking and ingenious solutions was put to make it happen – just have a look:

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Lukasz (our host) was fortunate to have her wife away on trip so he can utilize even ironing desk to fit the huge maps…