Our game in the Pacific Theatre last night was dreadful for my marines: we were landing on a beach where Randy’s Japanese had a most incredible defensive structure. The initial landing saw the death of all three of the first wave of leaders. From that point, it was all downhill. The session report is on BGG for those who are interested.

CC:P is a strange game after having played CC:E; you have a lot more control over certain aspects of the battlefield (weapons breaking, rallying, etc.), but it can be so difficult to fight the Japanese. Certainly, I made a hash of it last night!

The other game we’ve been playing, Memoir ’44, was – in the beginning – a light, not particularly deep, wargame. It’s changed as more and more expansions have come out for it. Once you get to the first of the Campaign Books, it’s still a moderately light game… but it runs deep. Boy, there’s a lot of play in the book – I can’t recommend it enough.

The campaign book links scenarios into “campaigns” where your overall victory depends on how you do in each scenario – and which scenario you play next depends on whether you won or lost the previous scenario. Very, very cool. And then, these smaller campaigns are linked together into bigger “Grand Campaigns”…

Over two nights (a week apart), Randy and I played through Barbarossa North, part of the Grand campaign of Operation Barbarossa; we played the campaign, not the Grand Campaign. It was four scenarios long and saw a narrow victory to Randy’s Russians: 19 to 17 by the end of it. I’ve detailed the first of the four scenarios here on BGG, and I’ll try to post the other sections in the near future.