If you're a gamer, chances are you've got an account on Board Game Arena. If you've got a BGA account, you likely have a favorite game. Mine is Memoir '44.

I started using BGA during the pandemic when gaming groups moved online. My 5e group moved to Roll20 and the board gamers to BGA. I enjoyed the games they had on BGA and played occasionally...until Days of Wonder announced they moved Memoir '44 from their platform to BGA. That's when things got real.

I'd been playing on their old site, but the site had limitations. It was no longer under development, bugs weren't addressed, and there was limited exposure. The move to BGA fixed all of that.

As a game, Memoir '44 presses ALL my buttons.

Game Overview

Memoir 44 (M44) is a historical hex-based board game where each of the two players battle representing opposing sides in World War Two battles over varied terrain with infantry, armor, and artillery at hand. A game consists of two rounds, where each player battles with both armies in turn. This ensures an even match as often on army has an advantage over the other on a specific map.

Tactical Complexity

With dozens of terrain types like fields, forests, village, and hedgerow as well as variants on the three basic fighting units, tactics are extremely important. There are scores of basic maps that, in the oft used "Tournament" setting, are chosen randomly, so it make take hundreds of game plays to experience all of the maps. This means that repeated game play helps you understand the specific interactions of the maps elements but you also need to be able to read a novel board and understand what moves might work. After thousands of plays, I'm still learning and becoming better.

Luck

The moves you make are dictated by a hand of cards drawn from a shuffled deck and each attack is a roll of the dice. This creates an ideal level of managed randomness. On the scale of 1 to 10 from "random" to "total information" Memoir 44 comes in at a solid 6.5. As a another indication of randomness, very rarely will a player's Elo rating exceed 500, but there's a lot in the 300s and 400s. This is ideal for for me as 'managing probabilities' and not tilting at bad dice add another layer I enjoy.

Historicity

I also like learning stuff and every default map is an actual battle of World War Two. The terrain and arrayed forces are an attempt to represent the setting of the battle. With each map is the dates of the battle and a description. I get to read a bit of history and get a sense of how the battle actually began. Ideal.

If you've got some free time, get onto BGA and try Memoir 44. It's a blast!