Undaunted: Normandy vs War Chest

What the two games have in common

More than the box art suggests, which is worth establishing before the differences.

Both are by the same two designers. Both are rated 14 and up by their publishers. Both resolve a contest between two sides on a small map in under an hour, and both deliberately refuse to let you simply move everything you own every turn -- the restriction that traditional war games spend pages of command rules on.

And both replace that rulebook with a physical constraint you can feel. Undaunted gives you a deck that is also your squad; War Chest gives you a bag of unit coins and lets you draw three of them a round. In both cases the question stops being what is the best move and becomes what is the best move I am able to make, which is the more interesting question and the reason either game holds up over a hundred plays.

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. David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, Osprey Games, 2019.
• War Chest -- 2-4 players, 30-60 minutes, ages 14+. 79 poker-chip-style unit coins, 16 cards, a board, 4 bags, 16 cardboard tokens and a rulebook. Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson, Alderac Entertainment Group.
• No release year is printed for War Chest anywhere on this site: AEG's product page states none and there is no reference entry for the base game we could reach. Undaunted's 2019 comes from Osprey's own page.
• Both were purchasable when this page was written. Availability is checked before anything is featured here, and each buy button carries the live price with the date it was checked.

Attrition against tempo: the difference that matters

This is the whole comparison, so it is worth being precise about both halves.

In Undaunted: Normandy every card in your deck is an individual soldier. When a unit takes a casualty the matching card is removed from your deck permanently for the rest of the scenario, which means a lost firefight is not a lost turn -- it degrades every hand you draw for the next forty minutes. You can spend turns reinforcing to put cards back, and choosing between strengthening your deck and pressing an attack while you still have the cards to do it is the recurring decision. The scenario has a downward slope and you spend it fighting gravity.

In War Chest you draw three unit coins from your bag each round and spend them on actions, and then you do it again. The bag is a cycle rather than a wound. A round where your coins do not match the crisis on the board is genuinely frustrating, but it does not compound -- next round is a fresh draw, and the publisher frames the skill as managing both the armies on the battlefield and the ones still waiting to be deployed.

So: do you want your mistakes to follow you, or do you want a clean slate every round? Players who find permanent loss gripping should buy Undaunted and will find War Chest a little weightless. Players who find it demoralizing should buy War Chest and will find Undaunted punishing. Neither reaction is wrong and both are predictable in advance, which is unusual and useful.

Exactly two, or two to four?

On this site's labeling, Undaunted: Normandy is Built for two and War Chest is Plays at two, and the distinction is not academic here.

Osprey lists Undaunted: Normandy at exactly 2 players with no scaling rules -- every decision in the design was made for a pair, because a pair is all it supports. AEG lists War Chest at 2-4, and its own description of the ending refers to a four-player game decided by teams. War Chest ships four bags rather than two with a workaround, so nothing is patched for two, but the design brief was wider.

If you have been repeatedly sold scaled-down group games as two-player games, this is the axis to buy on and Undaunted is the answer. If a game that also seats four is a feature rather than a compromise in your household, War Chest loses nothing at two and gains an option.

How much the theme asks of you

Undaunted: Normandy is a specific historical campaign handled seriously, and that is doing real work in the design rather than sitting on top of it -- the squads, the casualties and the ground being fought over are the point. For a lot of households that is exactly the appeal. For some it is a reason the box never gets suggested on a Tuesday evening, and that is a legitimate reason to choose differently.

War Chest is medieval in dressing and abstract in substance. You are not destroying an army; you are placing control markers, and the opposing units are the obstacle between you and the squares you need. The retail listing describes it as chess-like, which is fair: the feel is positional rather than narrative.

This is the quietest of the deciding factors and often the most decisive in practice. A game both of you will actually propose beats a better game that one of you keeps steering away from.

Session length, setup and how often each box opens

Osprey states 45-60 minutes for Undaunted; AEG states 30-60 for War Chest. The ranges overlap, so the honest version is that War Chest can be a weeknight game and Undaunted usually wants the evening.

Setup is close to a wash and both are quick by the standards of their shelf: cards and map tiles for Undaunted, coins into bags and a board for War Chest. Neither has the terrain-and-miniatures ritual that a game like Memoir '44 asks for every session.

Where they diverge is the shape of a long-term relationship with the box. Undaunted arrives with a campaign booklet that introduces units gradually across successive scenarios, so the first several plays are a structured run with a built-in reason to come back. War Chest has no campaign; its replay value is the variety in what you are holding, plus four expansions AEG sells separately if the base game runs dry. Campaign structure or open-ended variety -- another preference you can predict.

Cost, honestly

War Chest is the more expensive box of the two and one of the pricier games covered on this site; Undaunted: Normandy sits in the middle of the range. The live prices are on the buttons with the date checked, and they move independently, so check both rather than trusting an ordering we cannot guarantee next week.

What the extra buys in War Chest is component weight: 79 poker-chip-style coins is the thing everyone mentions first, and it does feel like a more expensive game in the hand. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on whether you want the cleaner, lighter contest it delivers.

If budget is the binding constraint and you mainly want the positional, abstract feel, neither of these is the cheapest route to it. Onitama and Hive are both published for exactly two players, cost less, and are two of the best games on this site.

Pick this if

• Pick Undaunted: Normandy if you want a game published for exactly two, if you want losses that stay lost, if the World War II subject matter is part of the appeal, or if a campaign with a built-in teaching order is how you like to learn a game. It is also the one to buy first if you might want the series, since North Africa is a standalone sequel on the same engine.
• Pick War Chest if you want the shorter end of the range on a weeknight, if you want a positional contest without a historical theme, if a fresh draw every round suits you better than mounting consequences, or if a game that also seats four is useful to you.
• Pick both only if the shared idea is the thing you love rather than the thing you have had enough of. They are the same question answered twice; a household that enjoys exactly one of these answers will play the other considerably less than it expects to.
• Pick neither if you want the cheapest good two-player abstract. Onitama is 15 minutes and Hive is 20, both published for exactly two players, and both cost less than either game here.

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, contents and the 2019 release year for Undaunted: Normandy from Osprey Games' own product page, and the player count, playing time, age rating, designers and contents for War Chest from AEG's own product page, along with the publisher's own description of the core loop -- three coins drawn per round, a coin usable for one of several actions, and the game ending when a player or team has placed all of its control markers.

Availability was checked before either game was featured here, and no price appears in this prose: the buy buttons carry live pricing, stamped with the date checked.

What we deliberately do not state: a release year for War Chest, because AEG's page gives none and no reference entry for the base game was reachable. There are no ratings out of ten on this page and no claim that we played a scenario of either game.