Undaunted: Normandy vs Memoir '44

What actually separates these two

Four things, in the order they matter for a pair deciding how to spend one evening and one purchase.

Player count is first, because on this site it is the spine. Osprey publishes Undaunted: Normandy for exactly 2 players. Days of Wonder publishes Memoir '44 for 2-4. Both are normally played by two, but only one of them is built for nothing else.

Then the teach. Memoir '44 is the easier explanation by a wide margin, and that is the reason it converts people who have refused war games for years. Then length and age: 30-45 minutes at 8+ against 45-60 minutes at 14+. And last, how much the dice decide, which is the most common reason someone regrets one of these two boxes.

The verified specs, side by side

• Undaunted: Normandy -- 2 players, 45-60 minutes, ages 14+. 108 cards, 18 large map tiles, dice, tokens and a campaign booklet. Designed by David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, published by Osprey Games, 2019.
• Memoir '44 -- 2-4 players, 30-45 minutes, ages 8+. A double-sided board, 144 army miniatures, 36 obstacles, 44 double-sided terrain tiles, 60 command cards, 22 summary cards, 8 attack dice, 6 activation tokens, two cardholders, a rulebook and a scenario book. Designed by Richard Borg, published by Days of Wonder, 2004.
• One source conflict, resolved in the publisher's favor: Days of Wonder prints 30-45 minutes for Memoir '44, while its reference entry says 30-60. The figure above is the publisher's.
• Both were purchasable when this page was written. Availability is checked before anything is featured here, and the buy buttons carry the live price with the date it was checked.

Two different answers to the same design problem

Every war game has to stop you from simply moving everything you own every turn. Traditional designs do it with command-and-control rules, which is where the page count comes from. These two solve it without any of that, in opposite ways, and this is the real difference between them.

Memoir '44 does it with your hand. The hex battlefield is divided into a left flank, a center and a right flank, and each command card lets you order units in a particular section or of a particular type. If the fighting is on your right and your hand is all left-flank orders, you are watching a crisis you cannot answer, and the decision becomes which inadequate option does least damage.

Undaunted: Normandy does it with your deck. Every card is an individual soldier, so you know exactly which units you have and not which of them will be in your hand this turn. Casualties remove the matching card permanently for the rest of the scenario, which means losing a firefight degrades every hand you draw for the next forty minutes. You can spend turns reinforcing instead of attacking, and choosing between those is the whole game.

Both produce the feeling of an order that did not arrive in time. Memoir '44 gets there after ten minutes of explanation; Undaunted gets there with more consequence attached.

Exactly two players, or two to four?

This is the distinction this site is organized around, so it gets stated plainly rather than rounded in either game's favor. Undaunted: Normandy is Built for two: Osprey lists 2 players and there are no scaling rules. Memoir '44 is Plays at two: Days of Wonder lists 2-4, where three or four players share command of an army in teams.

For a pair that costs less than it sounds on a normal evening. Most of the Memoir '44 scenario book is a straight one-against-one fight, and nothing is scaled down to accommodate two. But it is not nothing either. The celebrated large-scale Overlord scenarios ask you to play with two copies of the core game, so the content people most often rave about sits behind a second box.

If you want a war game whose entire design budget went on exactly your situation, that is Undaunted. If you want the game that will still get played when a third person turns up, that is Memoir '44.

How much the dice decide, honestly

Memoir '44 resolves combat with eight attack dice and they are unapologetically swingy. A full-strength unit in good terrain can be erased by one unlucky volley, and a hopeless last stand sometimes holds. If you want careful play to reliably beat careless play, this is the thing that will frustrate you, and it is almost always what people who bounce off this game bounced off.

The design has a real counterweight. Scenarios are short and asymmetric, and the standard way to play is to fight the same one twice with the sides swapped, which turns a swingy single game into a reasonable two-game comparison. It is how we would recommend playing it from the start.

Undaunted: Normandy also uses dice, but the pressure comes from your deck rather than from any single roll. The cost of a bad outcome is structural -- a card gone for the rest of the scenario -- which is more punishing over an hour and much less arbitrary in the moment. Pick your poison: variance you can laugh at, or consequence you cannot undo.

Length, age and how often the box opens

Thirty to forty-five minutes fits after dinner on a weeknight. Forty-five to sixty needs the evening set aside. Over a year that difference decides how many times each box actually comes off the shelf, and it deserves more weight than most comparisons give it.

Memoir '44 gives some of that back in setup. Laying out terrain tiles and placing well over a hundred miniatures to a scenario diagram is part of every session -- pleasant if you enjoy that sort of thing, a genuine chore if you do not. Undaunted sets up from cards and map tiles and is quicker to the first decision.

The age ratings are far apart and the gap is real: 8+ against 14+. If there is an older child who wants in, that is close to decisive on its own, and Memoir '44 is the lowest-aged competitive game we cover apart from Patchwork.

What is in the box, and why that matters more than it should

Memoir '44 is unusually full for its bracket: 144 army miniatures, 44 double-sided terrain tiles, a double-sided board and 60 command cards. Undaunted: Normandy is 108 cards, 18 large map tiles, dice and tokens.

That is not a quality ranking -- cards are not worse than plastic -- but it does change the experience in a way worth saying out loud. Miniatures on terrain tiles look like a battle. A tableau of cards looks like a card game about a battle. For some buyers that is most of the point, and for others the cards are the appeal, because the game is about managing a squad rather than admiring one.

Both are complete games out of the box. Neither needs an expansion to be worth the shelf space, and the only asterisk is the Overlord second-copy note above.

Pick this if

• Pick Undaunted: Normandy if you want a game published for exactly two players, if you want your decisions rather than the dice to decide it, and if a heavier first evening is a price you are happy to pay. It is also the one to buy if you want the series: the campaign booklet teaches it as you play, and North Africa is waiting if the system clicks.
• Pick Memoir '44 if one of you has always refused war games, if your evenings are short, if a younger player wants in at 8+, or if you want physical presence on the table. It is the most approachable historical war game in print, and that is an achievement rather than a consolation.
• Pick neither if you want the conflict kept abstract. Watergate is a historical card-driven game about a political scandal rather than a battle, and 7 Wonders Duel has a military track inside a civilization game -- both are gentler ways into conflict for two.
• Buy both only once the genre has taken. They overlap less than you would think, but two World War II boxes is a lot of shelf for a household still deciding whether it likes war games at all.

What we did instead of playing these

We have not played either game. What we did: took the player count, playing time, age rating, designers, publication year and box contents for Undaunted: Normandy from Osprey Games' own product page, and the same figures for Memoir '44 from Days of Wonder's own page, then the 2004 release year and the three-section battlefield from that game's reference entry. Where the publisher and the reference entry disagree on Memoir '44's playing time, the publisher's 30-45 minutes is what appears above, and the conflict is named rather than hidden.

Availability was checked before either game was featured. There are no ratings out of ten on this page, no claim that we ran scenarios, and no prices in this prose -- the buy buttons carry live pricing, stamped with the date it was checked.