Star Wars: Battle of Hoth

I have never been especially fond of Memoir ’44 or its relatives. My central objection still stands: a unit’s firepower does not diminish with its losses, which is a fairly grave sin for someone partial to Commands & Colors. In Battle of Hoth, though, the abstraction oddly stops bothering me; stormtrooper incompetence is so thoroughly part of the source material that the battle system finally seems to have found the uniform it was meant to wear.

You play through scenarios or a campaign, using cards to activate units and dice to turn orders into results. Interaction is immediate and military: you press a front, decide where you can afford to take losses, and try to exploit the moment when your opponent cannot answer in the sector you have opened.

Epic Hoth, using two boxes, changes the system’s behaviour in a meaningful way. More units mean that one excellent or dreadful roll is less likely to settle the whole game, while the longer contest makes hand management a proper part of the wider tactical picture; the interesting decision is when to save a card for the decisive attack and when to spend it simply to avoid surrendering initiative. It is Commands & Colors’ hand, in different overalls.

The result is an honest boxing match, not a simulation designed to satisfy every exacting grognard. Yet the system has attached itself to a theme that suits it remarkably well, and I have enjoyed it more than any game of this type in a very long time.

Updated session

The later report does not alter the first impression; it confirms it. Two Epic games both finished 10–9 to the Imperials and could readily have gone the other way, reinforcing the point that the larger scale gives the dice less power and player decisions more.