Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
We here at Meeple Mountain have written about the Undaunted series before. If you’re unfamiliar, I recommend talking a look at those articles to familiarize yourself with the system before continuing. Up until now, Undaunted has always been set during World War II, but Undaunted 2200: Callisto marks the series’s first foray into a science fiction setting. Americans and Nazis (for however long that distinction lasts) have been replaced with miners and their oppressive corporate overlords. Tanks and jeeps have been superseded by drills and giant mechs. A modular, tile-based board that is frankly a pain in the tuchus to setup has been improved upon with a series of double-sided traditional boards, one side per scenario.
Despite all of these superficial changes, this is still very much the Undaunted we know and love, with remarkably few changes to the mechanics. If previous installment Battle for Britain represented a significant formal revision, and to my personal tastes an unsuccessful one, Callisto is a return to form. If you know Undaunted, you know Callisto, though the mission goals have more variety than previous installments, they’ve added terrain height, and there are now:
Giant Stompy Mechs
Terrain height is a welcome addition, and its implementation is smooth as could be. Typical combat in Undaunted is done with D10. If you’re firing at an opponent who’s at the same elevation as you, that’s still the case. If you’re firing up, though, you’re rolling D8s, while firing down gets you D12s. In the Undaunted system, when a successful shot almost always requires a minimum of a 5 to hit, that’s a huge difference.
Designers David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin also got rid of one of Undaunted’s more controversial push-your-luck features: there are longer any automatic hits. Used to be, no matter how far you have to shoot, or how high the opponent’s defense, that a 10 would hit. You could always get lucky. No more.
The strategic implications of both these changes are immediate. Shooting your opponent isn’t, and never has been, a reliable strategy for victory in Undaunted, which is part of what makes the series so compelling. Smart play beats firepower nine times out of ten. If your opponent sets up shop and starts taking pot shots, you can largely ignore them, but there’s always the chance that they’ll get an infuriatingly ill-timed lucky shot. In Callisto, ceding the high ground to your opponent is a risky choice, but your defense values will always matter. Troops can even add to their defense by sharing space with the drills and giant stompy mechs, a fine bit of flavoring.
The giant stompy mechs represent a new experiment. Each mech has multiple pilots, represented by their own cards in your deck. One moves, while the other shoots. This acts to temper the power of these beefcakes, making it unlikely that you’ll be able to do more than one thing with them on each turn. Whether or not this is successful as an experiment will depend on your patience. For me, they work like gangbusters; while most of your turns are played with the long arc of the game in mind, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of a turn in which you can unleash the full might of your mech, playing three pilots for the same unit and leaving no survivors.
Unequaled
I am firmly in the pocket for Undaunted. It may be my favorite franchise in board games. The balance of push-your-luck die rolls, deck management, and the second-guessing that goes into bidding for turn order make it ideal for my tastes. Britain is the only installment to miss for me, and Undaunted: Stalingrad is a masterpiece. I’ll always gladly play more, especially when Callisto represents such a strong change of setting. It’s easier to get people to sit down for sci-fi than WWII. Such is the way of things.
Callisto makes smart changes to the presentation and setup, and fun but slight adjustments to the proven formula. Is it essential? Hard to say. No more or less than most of the other entries, I guess, but I think Undaunted is about as essential as a game design can get, so that’s more of a compliment than an insult. Undaunted is reaching the “choose your flavor” stage of its existence. I think that’s terrific. A system like this should find a place in every gaming collection.
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