After all those days of board gaming at Con of the North 2026, I wasn’t quite ready to stop. So I pulled out a game I’d been meaning to learn for a while, Undaunted 2200: Callisto. I own the WW2 original Undaunted series, which I love, even if I never find someone to play it with consistently. And I’m well aware not everyone likes Nazis in their game, even imaginary ones. So 2200 goes with a scifi theme instead and changes it up a bit. Rather than using tiles to set up the game, it has four heavy two-sided boards to avoid the painful initialization. And instead of just troops (that changes in further expansions of Undaunted), it has troops and mechs, which have multiple pilots, gunners, etc. The abilities each unit has reflect the capability of attacking other troops or mechs or both. If you’re not familiar with the game, it’s card driven. So you need to draft your units/cards, return them to the pool when they’re not useful at different stages or you want to optimize drawing other cards, and keep enough of them in your deck that when your opponent gets a kill, there’s a card to remove from the game as “damage”. When there are no more cards to remove from your hand, discard, or deck, that unit is no more.
It took me a while to refamiliarize myself with the basic Undaunted rules. And then some additional time with the slight rule differences. I agree with Shut Up and Sit Down (vlog on youtube) that the manual is NOT an easy bit of documentation to parse, even if the rules are fairly minimal. And there were some bits and pieces that were a little more difficult to sus out without playing through it a few times and then looking up online commentary. For example, how bridges and elevated platforms don’t block line of sight. Think of them as “on stilts”. The only real line of sight that exists is between under a bridge and on a bridge (and it’s not a hop up and down, you need to go at it from the ends of the bridge in that case). That’s a good reminder for myself: scenario 2 has bridges and I should verify I’m using them correctly when it comes to moving non-mech troops into the underside of the facility.
Suppression is another tricky rule. I thought per the rulebook it applied to mechs and troops, but the suppression skill has to have the mech icon in the suppression ability for that to work. Otherwise, mechs can be fairly un-suppressionable which is a significant perk if you’re going up against a bunch of chain guns that roll four dice and just keep pinning you down every turn unless you draw a card combo to get out of suppression and do a follow up action.
That said….because I’m playing with myself, I’m slowly figuring out my blind spots. After about 5 rounds of the first scenario, I’ve moved on to scenario number two which introduces pulses (push a unit) and basically mortar-type weapons (all enemy units in a zone) for the miners, and a new mech for the corporate security forces. Did I mention it’s a bit of capitalism vs. labor theme? I have to tell my brain not to be biased toward labor while playing myself. However, I know strategically I’m still not using the mechs quite right as they tend not to move much, and just lay down suppression fire. Part of me always thinks they’re more fragile than they are because I’m so used to troop suppression grinding an advance to a halt. There is a solo mode, but I find it more interesting to basically have half my brain pretend it doesn’t know what the other half is doing and play as two players. That way if I want to teach it or host it somewhere that allows two person games, I’m more prepped. Something to check on for next year’s Con. Or maybe one of the local brewery gaming nights if I give some advance warning. Fortunately, I’m always happy to teach something to a new group and arbitrate. I learn as much seeing it through fresh eyes.
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