On Wednesday, Slitherine Games announced that it had partnered with Asmodee to release a digital edition of Richard Borg’s iconic WW2 strategy board game Memoir ’44. I got a behind the scenes peek at an early alpha demo with developer Volcanite, and I think Slitherine is underselling the project – more than half of what I saw (and sadly am not allowed to show you) was completely new for the digital edition.
If all you want from a digital Memoir ’44 is a straight up adaptation of the classic strategy board game, you’ll find that in the skirmish and multiplayer modes. This uses the same elegant core rules, with all 24 scenarios from the base game present and correct.
For those unfamiliar with Memoir, each scenario pits two armies of cute little infantry and tanks into pitched battle across a hex grid battlefield in Northern France. You control your forces with an ever-shrinking hand of command cards, each of which allows you to activate some of your units, but rarely the exact ones you need right at this moment. It’s a simple system that conveys the friction of battlefield command with the minimum of systems, making for games that are quick yet characterful.
The big new feature for Memoir ’44 digital is an original singleplayer campaign which takes those rock solid core mechanics and blends them with ideas from roguelite deck builders. You’ll start with a choice of three different decks of command cards; destroying enemy units and winning scenarios earn you Requisition Points which you can spend to add or upgrade cards in your deck, or prune away the excess. And to support this new meta-progression, Volcanite is creating brand new command cards that simply don’t exist in the tabletop game.
Winning missions and completing new optional objectives within them will reward you with Medals, a separate currency that can be used to unlock Perks. The single Perk I saw in the demo granted a ‘Specialization Card’, an upgrade played at the start of the match which could turn one infantry unit into a sniper or a field gun into a bigger field gun.
It’s early days yet. The team have only been working on the game for five months; many of the interfaces I saw were placeholders, and the AI apparently needs a lot of work. If the team makes the base game a success, there could be a lot more to follow. Volcanite says that the game’s tools for building scenarios are robust enough to release to the community to use. That’s a solid basis for the studio itself to make post-launch DLC relatively quickly – and there’s no shortage of tabletop expansions to adapt.
As for the really big stuff, like the absurd, eight player Operation Overlord, there aren’t any plans yet: but studio co-founder Mattio Pastorino says the team is considering how it might be possible. I’ll be watching this one closely. If you’re interested too, come and say hi in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
