Memoir '44 doesn't hold a special place in my heart, but I do have great memories. It's a fun game about a particularly destructive part of history that serves to make accessible the common wargamer's affinity for relative historical accuracy. It also acts as a tribute, presented in a respectful way as to preserve the integrity of both the game and those who play it. I don't leave it out of my top considerations for any good reason; it is at all times well designed, excellently produced and easy to understand. My problem is that I didn't play it enough.
All gamers travel peaks and valleys during their time spent at the table. There are chapters of your life where you may have a particularly common game night with a steady group, playing some games you like and some you love, and others you don't want to see again. Some of these people you play games with may move or stop playing, or you might move or stop playing. Work may get busy, you may travel, get hired somewhere else and have to commit to other facets of this modern life because you do or do not want to. It is both normal and necessary, and it makes us who we are, defines our history and the stories we tell about games we played during that time when we played for hours. Memoir '44 is a part of that for a lot of people because it was popular a long time ago. Since then, times have changed for everybody, new games have been released, innovations in design have been made and game groups have formed and deformed. Memoir '44 lands during one of those times when I was winding down on the hobby.
It's a game where you should play every scenario to fully understand the story it is telling, and that's something I didn't do. A couple of plays of Bridge Too Far (or the like named equivalent), the Omaha Beach scenario, one or two of the town raids (if I'm remembering correctly, this is almost a decade ago) and I think I probably executed about half of the book's scenarios, but there are a couple I think I shyed away from that I would like to get into now, and they include the more complex scenarios with many tank formations and encampments. Of course, some of these are naturally unbalanced. For historical accuracy the designers made sure to replicate, using their system, the balance of power at the start of the engagement. I remember that being a particularly satisfying aspect of the game, and at times frustrating.
Another aspect of that system was the board's segmentation, and the cards that commanded the units. Hand management along with miniatures tactics is something we may see a lot of today, but at the time I had just gotten my hands on it, and everything about the game beamed of great things to come for the hobby. So when I took a break for the sake of my education, wallet and future, I remember Memoir '44 being the thing that kind of pulled me back in years later. Not because we got back in to playing it, but because it represented the way I felt about the hobby when I took a break in 2009 - that there was unfinished business. There are so many unplayed scenarios still waiting in those books for me to come back and share with people, and the promising boom the hobby saw during my absence only sold me harder on the worth of those scenarios. Memoir is a constant light on the horizon because it represents, for me, the unplayed chapters, formats and characters in our collections. In that closet of yours is a box with a special power you've never activated or a card you've never played, and an "Oh look at this!" moment waiting to happen. I'd like to pull it off the shelf soon.
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