Star Wars: Battle of Hoth

With coded cries of “let’s get stuck in” and provocative sound clips playing from phones before bodies and dice start rolling, this Memoir ’44 retheme in Star Wars has gone slightly to our heads. I have brought it out with my group, with my successor, as standalone scenarios, and as a campaign; it is hard to ask for more reasons to set it up again. Yes, I could ask for sturdier rules, less luck, and various other useful things. But honestly, none of us cares here: it had been a very long time since I had had this much fun with a board game.

At its core, the game follows the familiar Memoir ’44 approach and that of its related systems: scenarios, units on the battlefield, and dice that can swing a battle abruptly. That was exactly what kept me away from Memoir and its clones when they first appeared. I do not like that a unit’s losses do not reduce its firepower; I am more of a C&C person. In Hoth, though, stormtrooper inaccuracy is such an organic part of the cinematic coating that the same abstraction stops bothering me.

Epic Hoth, using two boxes and a greater number of units, meaningfully changes the dynamic. Good or bad dice do not disappear, but their impact is reduced, and the game becomes an honest boxing match rather than a sequence of isolated blows from luck. Its longer duration also gives hand management real weight as part of the wider tactical picture: it is not enough to react to the current clash; you need to manage your hand with the battle’s development in mind.

The conclusion is simple: an already good system found an honest, and for me extremely effective, theme and clicked into place. I will not pretend that all my reservations about luck or the system’s abstraction have suddenly been solved. Battle of Hoth simply makes them feel unimportant beside the joy of playing Star Wars battles again and again. We got our money’s worth; next up are the two campaigns in the core box.

Updated session

The later Epic experience does not contradict the initial enthusiasm; it reinforces it. In both games the Imperials won narrowly, 10–9, but the results could easily have gone the other way. At this larger scale, luck is still present, but the greater amount of material on the table and the importance of hand management make the system feel fairer and more tactical.