Trashdome - Tide Of Iron vs Memoir '44

WELCOME TO TRASHDOME!

This is part of a series of bloody matches to the death. Show support for your favorite game so it will do better in the fight. You can support it by writing why you think its the better game and more importantly by betting on it. End your first post in this thread with the title of the game you're placing a bet on (i.e. voting for) so its clear to me when reading it later. You have until Friday when I tally the bets and declare the winner. The winning game may return for future matches, the loser will be dead. Counting expansions or not is entirely up to you just as playing with them or not is. I will reserve my bet for any tie-breakers.

Although you should be familiar with both games, there is no rule that says you have to have played both of them. The only rule in Trashdome is this;

Two games enter! One game leaves!

Memoir '44.

This is the first trashdome where I have actually played both games.

I don't doubt that Tide of Iron is the "deeper" game but Memoir is far more accessible, shorter, and (in my opinion) looks nicer. So my vote should be obvious.

Memoir '44

This is easy.

Both are games that aimed to straddle the thematic and strategic line somewhere between meaningless "violence themed" games and serious war games.

Memoir managed to be light and fast playing while totally capturing the spirit and essence of what it was trying to represent.

ToI managed to be slow and turgid while completely failing to capture the spirit and essence of what it was trying to represent.

So I vote for Memoir. If I was going to play ToI, I'd rather play CoH instead.

Wow, I thought this was going to be nothing short of of ToI DDT'ing M44 through a table, but Matt has a great counter...ToI is close enough to CoH that I'd rather play CoH.

But that being said, M44 kind of sucks. It's only good because the system is good, and the system is MUCH better suited to ancients (or the Civil War). BATTLELORE remains the worst of the lot, but M44, with its bizarro "World War II-ish" setting (not theme) just fails for me.

The way they did the expansions was so asinine I can't believe it. Selling the board separately...and the board gamers bitch about MAGIC?

I'll probably never play M44 again...ToI, I still do enjoy because it's more "Hollywood" than CoH.

TIDE OF IRON still pulls off the DDT and M44 lays shaken and confused in a pile of chipboard.

I'm a big M'44 player because it is (usually) fun and being short I can find opponents for it more regularly, both F2F and Vassal PBEM. But a couple of things grate on me regularly in the game:
- one is the combination of sector card and combat dice, you can find your strong units suddenly being slaughtered by a 1 strength Infantry unit because you ran out of sector cards and when you did play your last couple for that advance the dice failed you miserably, so now you sit there and get chewed up without being able to defend yourself.
- most scenarios do not have any objective apart from kill your opponents units first. There are some that have objectives to capture or exit teh board from, and one has a timer in that when teh deck is finished then one side automatically loses. But, even though the scenario tells you what you should be recreating (i.e. the 8th Army advancing at El Alamein), you get opponents now and then who sit around and wait for you to come to them so they can take advatage of the terrain they sit in.

Tide of Iron has obvious answers to both of these:
- first you can activate every unit any turn, plus you get defence dice if you are sitting dead (which at least makes you feel like you aren't a duck on the water).
- and the game has objectives, game timer based on turns (usually), and control points to take to give you command points to spend on cards and such.
Plus it actually feels like a wargame, but you can't count that against M'44 since it wasn't designed to be one.

Even though I hardly get it out, and it takes longer to set up, and takes a fair bit longer to play, my vote goes to:

Tide of Iron

I've never played Tide of Iron before but I have played Memoir '44. I like Memoir for what it's supposed to be. It seems to capture the essence of a war game without getting too bogged down in the rules. I hate the way the cards play out sometimes but I think that's supposed to simulate that your men don't always do exactly what you tell them to do. My other complaint is that the units don't lose strength until they are actually dead. But overall it's a good game.

TOI captures everything I personally want from a tactical war game. CoH is just as good, but on component quality TOI wins.

Memoir is a pansy game for pansy Euro dweebs. TOI eats Memoir for breakfast.

Tide of Iron

SQUAD LEADER charges the arena and single-handedly chokeslams both M'44 and TOI!

TOI still manages to reach out a hand, though, and pins M'44.

TIDE OF IRON

Tide of Iron: shitty components, even shittier scenarios (and that's saying something), boring, flaccid gameplay. Sold after three tries.
Memoir '44: ridiculous fun. Still playing after 100 games.

Vote: Memoir '44

mikoyan wrote:

My other complaint is that the units don't lose strength until they are actually dead. But overall it's a good game.

If you're saying this from a reality point of view, the unit count represents morale, not firepower. If you're saying this from a gameplay point of view, you're totally right, it seems off, and it might improve the game to fix that.

Memoir 44

Generalpf - Huh? Tide of Iron has shitty components? Where?

I'm not a big fan of the commands & colors system in general, but I liked Memoir 44 even less than Battlelore. The system felt completely wrong for the battle. And honestly, what's good about this system, other than that it's simple? I HATE the victory conditions, HATE them. I was so happy when I found out that Tide of Iron would have proper victory conditions, i.e. you have to make to this bridge and hold it for x turns. I love that, with the command hexes, there's objectives on the board in ToI (I realize that there's some random, barely important objectives in M44 too, but it's usually not worth it when you can just kill a unit and get the same thing). I feel like I almost never *care* about any one of my units in a C&C game, unlike the heroes I feel sad to sacrifice in ToI. The board always feels very static in a C&C game; once a unit moves, it might not move again for a loooooooooong time. I can't believe ToI is getting such hate in this thread; I think it's one of FFG's more fluid, easy-to-play games, like BSG is.

Vote: TIDE OF IRON

I picked up Memoir when it came out and thought it was ok, but didn't really feel like a war game, hemmed and hawed over the expansions (especially the Russian one), but decided against picking them up (and I'm an expansionaholic).

I also dabbled in Axis and Allies minis, but hated the collectible aspect,the unbalanced units, and power creep (I guess those are issues with all collectible games).

ToI came along and I haven't played either since. I know some people dislike Tide because its fiddly and long, but it just hits the right spots for me and the people I play it with. It feels a bit like A&A minis modified into a (much better) board game.

I keep Memoir around because I've got the space, I might end up playing it again with someone who wants to play a light quick war game, and to play with my son if he wants to when he's old enough.

Tide of Iron

I've never played CoH, and I am tempted but a) I'd have to buy it blind (no local stores have it in stock, no way to try it out before hand), b) it seems like the scenarios would be a bit limited (East front only 1941-43?), c) with ToI and Combat Commander getting fairly regular play, do I really need another WWII game?

Question: if CoH had normal counters (eg. Combat Commander), would everyone still be raving about it, are the basic rules that good?

I've come closer to playing out Memoir '44 than any other game I own. While I like ToI, own both big-box expansions to date, and would definitely play more of it should someone present him/herself, I think Memoir just outdoes ToI--not in being an accurate re-creation of World War II tactics but in being a clean, fun game. Had ToI come out two years earlier, it would've been more amazing than it is; as it happened, though, it exists in a crowded field where other middleweight games (Combat Commander, Conflict of Heroes) do most or all of what ToI does with more clarity, more "grit," or more flair.

So I say Memoir.