Star Wars: Battle of Hoth from Days of Wonder

We put Star Wars: Battle of Hoth on the table, compare it to Memoir ’44, and test how well the Hoth theme holds up under fast, card-driven tactics. Quick scenarios, clean rules, and cinematic moments make this a strong gateway war game with a few thematic misses.

• how command cards drive three-lane tactics
• why snowspeeders vs AT-ATs feel iconic
• where leader cards underdeliver on theme
• scenario length, pace, and teaching new players
• campaign structure vs deeper narrative systems
• terrain, line of sight, and common rules snags
• balance swings, dice variance, and hand management
• component scale, minis visibility, and table pop

Well, if we said anything wrong, let us know in the comments and let us know if you've played Memoir 44 or Star Wars Battle of Hoth

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast, back and better than ever. Today I'm joined by a man who it's once rumored he flexed once over Christmas break and the sleeves fell off of his t-shirt. He's Clayton Gable. How are you doing, Clay?

SPEAKER_00 0:31

I'm doing good. That's no rumor. That's true facts. There's pictures to prove it. Yeah, some people have just muscles that can't be contained by normal sleeves. And this is my tank tops are a staple in my wardrobe.

Why Battle Of Hoth, Not Memoir ’44

SPEAKER_01 0:45

That's right. Today we have a very special episode. We are talking Star Wars Battle of Hoth. Not Battle for Hoth, Battle of Hoth, which is a re-implementation of the Memoir 44 mechanics uh in Star Wars format. I'm gonna go to this one. Boom. Uh looking good. Yeah. Today we're talking Star Wars Battles of Hoth. So hop on your Taunton and get back to base because we got to defend some shield generators. Clayton, you had the opportunity to play this. Uh how who did you play this with, first off?

SPEAKER_00 1:16

So I played this a couple times with my oldest son, Mason. So we played through the first two scenarios, me and him. My younger son Isaac uh rode side saddle with me, kind of helped me through it. Um, so we played a couple times, and then I played it once with my neighbor, and we went through the first scenario. I was excited to show him the game because he is a big Star Wars fan and he's been a budding gamer coming over lately. So I got it, and I was like, hey, just got this new Star Wars game. It's pretty slick, pretty easy to learn. So come check it out. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

And uh you picked this up because of your love for Star Wars, because you had Christmas money. What made you uh want to get into this game?

How The Hoth Theme Lands

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Largely impulse by with the Christmas money. Yes, I was I was at the local game shop, I was perusing around, nothing was catching my eye. Battle of hot. Well, all right, here I'll get real with everybody. I just reorganized my game shelves. Maybe I'll post a picture of this, but I made it more of like a cinematic display, like um, like a game with an IP, and then like a Lego set built with that with that IP. So I've got you know a huge TIE fighter and Star Wars Rebellion on one shelf, and I had another shelf with another Lego set, and I was like, I don't really have that many Star Wars games. So I was just in the store, I had just done this setup on my shelves, and I was like, I could probably use another, you know, display piece for that shelf. And Battle of Hoth was there, so I was like, heck, you know, I've always been interested in Memoir 44 and the theme. I'm interested in it as a game. The theme never really did a lot for me, yeah. Uh, for what it's worth. But Days of Wonder has been reputable. That game has had some serious legs for them. So I was like, you know what? If I was gonna play it, I would I would play the Star Wars version, so I picked it up. So never played Memoir 44. I think maybe once on BGA, you invited me to a game and it and I just clicked through and had no idea what was going on. So yeah, that is my experience with memoir 44.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Yeah, I think it's a game that kind of lends itself to that because the iconography on the cards is pretty simple. Uh, but in memoir 44, it's a lot of storming the beaches. Granted, I've only played a couple of the scenarios, but most of them are you're storming beaches uh against different defense, and you have like the allies versus the Axis, and you are um, you know, storming up the beach, facing the defenses, and they're trying to reposition troops and reposition position defenses to prevent you from getting up the beach. And every scenario has its own win conditions about destroying bunkers or destroying a certain type of infantry unit or you know, whatever it is. Um, and Battle of Hoth takes all that and re-implements into Star Wars vocabulary, basically. So you have you know the big icy field of Hoth, and you have your rebellion on one side that is kind of living in the trenches trying to repel the Empire's incursion, and the Empire is trying to either cross a certain line or destroy a certain number of units or reach shield done shield generators or what have you, and it kind of depends on the scenario. So before we get into anything, how well do you think that the theme is implemented into Battle of Hoth?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

I think it's done pretty well. I like I said, uh I've only played the first two scenarios. It's a it comes with 17 scenarios, and I think you know, it does a good job of you know pitting certain aspects of what it's like to fight with the rebellion against the empire. So, you know, there's scenarios where the rebellion has the snow speeders out, and the empire's got their big old do you say at atts or do you say at?

SPEAKER_01 5:14

I say ats, but um, I don't know both ways.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Either way. Um, so you have scenarios where you know one side has this cool feature, and you know, obviously the snow snow speeders can move very quickly in the game, and the ATATs are lumbering around and can do a ton of damage even at range. Yeah. I think as well as it as well as it can, I mean, I think the scenarios go a long way to kind of drive that out. And there are, and I didn't play with them, but there are leader cards that you can add to the game. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, from what I can tell, they just give you an action, but have a picture of Darth Vader on them. So I don't know how much theme you can derive out of that. I I threw a couple of them. I was like, okay, that's interesting. These are just like power cards, but they've got you know, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and Leia. So uh they did put that in there. That felt more tacked on than the actual, you know, overarching scenario.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Yeah, and I I kind of wish that they would have implemented that a little better. Um, you have games like um was it Imperial Assault.

unknown 6:26

Oh, yeah.

Leaders, Minis, And Missed Thematic Beats

Iconic Moments: Tow Cables And AT-ATs

Core Mechanics Explained Simply

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Star Wars game is kind of like the the grid movement skirmisher where you are going through different like tunnels and hallways and peeking around corners and shooting at enemies and stuff, and people really have a lot a lot of fondness for that game. Um, and I each character is unique. You can buy individual characters like Thrawn and Obi-Wan and all this stuff, but like the base game comes with a whole bunch of heroes, and each expansion has specialty heroes that give you more than just like a card to play, they give you an actual mini that moves around the map that has unique features. That would have been so much better. Yeah, this game, you're like, oh, and Luke is there too, and he gives me an extra dice roll or something, you know. Like, that's not exactly what the card says, but it feels a little disappointing to have these like beefy characters that you know have great impact on the story, the most impact on the Star Wars story, and it's just a card that's represented by an action, and uh yeah, that's a little disappointing to me. But they do find ways to sneak the theme in in really cool ways, like the snow speeders can take down the ATATs by moving up next to them, releasing a tow cable, circling around the ATATs, which are very slow, and then potentially bringing them down. So that type of stuff is cool. You you know that's how they brought them down in the movies, so that's how they have to come down in the game. Otherwise, it just wouldn't feel thematic to have you know a bunch of ground troopers shooting blasters at a big giant mech that's walking towards them. Like they found ways to inject the theme and inject the IP, but they just got like halfway there, which is a little disappointing to me. But you know, it's it's it's rated 8.0 on BGG, it's well liked. I think people have fondness for the memoir 44 mechanics. Um, do you wanna do you want to get into mechanics a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 8:15

I do. I really want to talk about the mechanics because let's talk about it. It was so much simpler than I imagined. Like I had preconceived notions about what memoir 44 was, and from my cursory BGA click through, I was like, I don't know what's going on. But I I opened the rule book, I was like, oh, that's it. I mean, on your turn, you have a certain amount of cards, each scenario is a little different, but essentially the map is divided up into three sections, and your card will say you can move two units in the rightmost section, and when you well, let's say command units, sorry, that's the proper term because when you command a unit, you can move them and then you can also attack with them if you have line of sight on something, and that's pretty much it. Like you play a card, you can command units and then attack, and then you draw back up. And so you're just positioning and attacking, and each unit has its own you know, pros and cons, like we kind of touched on already. You know, the snow speeders are fast, and when they're up close, they can deal a lot of hits, but they can't don't have a ton of range, and then there's different like artillery units that can reach pretty far out, but they don't move maybe, and then you know, just your normal ground units, they can forego the attacking phase to move an extra time. So each little troop has its own little pros and cons, and there's a great little player aid that pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Comes in the box, it'll be like, all right, this is what this unit can do. This is how far you can shoot with it, and then how many dice you roll based on how far away you are from your target. So, you know, I have an infrared infantry unit, it's three hexes away from the target, it only gets to roll one die. And then the hits are pretty simple too. Each unit can get hit by a certain face on the die. So everybody gets hit hit by like the Starburst blast unit. That'll take out your infantry, you'll take out your snow speeders, artillery, whatever. But then your infantry are also taken out if you roll the picture of an infantry person getting taken out.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

And I mean, it's just super clear. And the objectives, at least in the beginning scenarios, are super clear too. I mean, you're just trying to gain medals, and medals are gained when you eliminate an entire unit. So most units consist of a group of two or more, it couldn't be one, uh, but they're a group of, you know, your little minis on the board. And so when my minis get targeted by somebody, if they roll two hits and I had a unit that consisted of three infantrymen, and I would get rid of two of them, now I have one left. So if they target that again and knock out that final person from that unit, that's one medal for them. Okay, and that's pretty much the rules to play the the first scenario. You I mean, those are the only it starts you nicely with just the infantry units. You're going infantry on infantry, you're just rolling dice against each other. And then as the book progresses, I again I only went through number two, but in number two, you see the snow speeders and the ATAT as well. So it rolls that in pretty quick, and then just the different ways you can configure the starting map to you know create different dynamics.

Scenarios, Campaign, And Evolution

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Yeah, and it's worth noting that this plays at two players, and there is a campaign mode. So you can run through sequentially all these different scenarios, and whether you win or lose, you either get cards from a special deck that then get added into your like draw pile later on that have special abilities and different types of units and stuff. So this game does evolve as you go along, um, or you can just play the scenarios straight up. If you want to jump to one that seems interesting, that's okay too. I would love, I don't have any sort of uh knowledge about the campaign really. I got I don't really know what that looks like um and how it changes over time. I haven't played it, um, but I know that in MMR44, like you get special units and stuff. I don't think that the changes from campaign to campaign, scenario to scenario, have as much impact on the overall like story as you would get from something like Undaunted. And Undaunted is like a slug fest. You have these specialty units and snipers and infantry and tanks and all this, like all this stuff going on. And uh, as you plink away at each other's characters or like troopers going uh in this map, if you lose them, they're they're gone for the next scenario. So, like keeping up your troop numbers and these special characters and stuff really matters in Undaunted, and I'm not sure what the impact is in memoir 44. I don't I don't really have any sort of like I don't know, experience with the campaign.

Gateway Appeal And Teaching New Players

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah, but what we do have experience with is introducing this game to new people, and I think this especially I again I can't speak for memoir 44. The the historical theme smileage may vary for you. I mean, if you're playing it with like your grandpa or uncle who's super into World War II, that might be a game that they're like, oh, that's awesome. Let's play memoir 44. But I think for like general audience, someone that's familiar with Star Wars, this was like a 1.9 on you know, BGG weight-wise, which is probably appropriate. I mean, this is honestly a really good gateway game that I wasn't expecting. It plays in, you know, the scenarios I played were done in like 20-30 minutes. It was snappy. And you know, the where the rules do get a little bit fiddly with the different terrain that you can have out and the line of sight rules, as long as the person teaching the game kind of understands those, I think you can get by pretty easy. And a lot of it's pretty thematic, right? I mean, you have a huge ice sculpture in front of you, you probably can't shoot at the guy on the other side of it. Yeah, and like snow speeders can move over giant holes in the ground, whereas your infantry troop troops can't. So, I mean, if you take you know just a step back and look at it from a theme perspective, a lot of that terrain stuff actually makes a lot of sense. I will say the line of sight still sometimes I'm like, okay, hold on. Is it from the center of the hex to like I can't have anything touch it? So the line of sight things can were the one thing that held me up a little bit, but I mean, generally speaking, rules were super straightforward.

Components, Scale, And Table Presence

Balance, Luck, And Scenario Difficulty

SPEAKER_01 15:09

But as far as war games go, I you're not pulling out a laser to like judge line of tight, you're not like measuring distances or anything like that. The hexes are pretty clear, and I think there's only like I don't know, four or five different types of terrain that's in this box. So once you get them down, you can just roll through them. My other, my other kind of thing. Oh, six, I'm sorry. Well, it's five, two of them are the same. Um, yes, yeah. But I wish that they would have presented a little bit of scale in the mini in the minifigs. Not like, I get it. You're trying to fit this all in a decent sized box. The box is a little bit larger than your standard Calyx Square, uh, but the ATATs are like not even twice the size as the troopers. I would have loved to have seen like a little bit more scale, like just try and make them a little bit bigger. Snow speeders, maybe like somewhere in between the trooper and the ATAT. I I'm a sucker for that stuff. It stuff that looks cool on the table out of all the ATAT molds and the minis are cool. Uh, they don't really present like this colossal threat. Like if you were making this a World War II version, it would be like the size of a tank versus like you know, something much larger. So I wish that they would have done a little bit more for scale, but it does look cool for the tables, and the molds are really unique and and different, and they they do stand out. I just I will say if you are pulling this out of the box and plopping it down, those white minis on the white frost of uh off are a little hard to see. So maybe just pull out a little can of primer and give them a quick spray, give them a spritz and make them pop a little bit. But um, yeah, I I thought this game's really cool. I I wish I uh you know had the dedication to sit down and play through all the scenarios and do the whole campaign and stuff, but I think this lends itself, especially if you have one other person that you can get to the table repeatedly, that you can like pull this out in periodic segments, maybe jot down a couple notes from your last like session, throw it in the box, box it up, and then whenever you have time, pull it back out again. And the the scenarios are short enough where even if you pick it up and you need to restart a scenario or something, it lends itself to that, right? It they're 20, 30 minutes a pop, and it's fun to just pull out, plink away at a individual scenario, too, if you if you want to just jump right in.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Yeah, you're a victim of the dice roll. I mean, a lot of times you can roll unlucky, and I also don't know. I I am attributing this falsely to my superior gamesmanship to my nine-year-old, but it seemed like it was a bloodbath for the rebels, at least in scenario one and two. And I don't know if they you know realistically tweaked the scenarios, and I don't know if they do this in memoir 44, like you know, if the Germans were really up against it, do they make the scenario balance so that you know nine times out of ten, the you know, the good guys are winning? Or in this case, the rebels were up against it at the start of the battle. So, I mean, I yeah, do you know anything about that?

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Yeah, I know that memoir 44 has scenarios where it's kind of rated based on difficulty. And some of the later scenarios, you are definitely out outgunned, outmatched, and uh potentially outmaneuvered depending on the obstacles that are in your way. Because in memoir 44, the base game, haven't played them all. There's like, you know, the little uh what do you the iron crosses or whatever that are in the sand that you have to maneuver around? There's big like uh you know, firing pits and dug into the sand that you have to maneuver around. And some of that stuff is really hard to navigate, especially when you're limited to just three lanes. But I think that's driven by the mechanic where you play a card and it tells you which of the lanes that you can activate. Some of them are all, but you know, it's all based on the luck of the draw and which cards you get. So you kind of have to sprinkle your or spread your troops out across the map so that you can always maneuver something versus like pigeonholing all your forces to one lane and potentially drawing all these cards that don't do you any good because you're trying to move, let's say, the right side, and all your troops are stacked up on the left, trying to push through. And so it's it's driven by the roll of dice, it's driven by the draw of the cards, and sometimes that just doesn't work out in your favor. But yeah, that there's some more difficult scenarios than others for sure.

Final Thoughts And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Yeah. No, no, all things considered, I I think this is a really slick intro. I don't even know if you would call it war gaming. I it might be so far removed from the complexities of war gaming. It's the closest thing I've played to. Like a you know, war game where it's just one v one troops on a map. Yeah, troops on mapping it. So I I I think it's I think it's a great easy intro for that. Baby's first war game.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

And it's Star Wars. How can you name it?

SPEAKER_00 20:15

And Clay's first war game too.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Clay's first war game.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Yeah. I am a b I am a baby gamer.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

That's okay. We're it's all right. We we accept all types of gamers here at OGN.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Well, if we said anything wrong, let us know in the comments and uh let us know if you've played Memoir 44 or Star Wars Battle for Hoth. Battle of Hoth. I did it at the end. Battle of Hoth.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Is that a thing? Because did did Star Wars Unlimited just come out with a Battle of Hoth?

SPEAKER_01 20:42

They did. Yeah, they came out with like a beginner set Star Wars Unlimited Battle for Hoth.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Really?

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Yes. And so I'm getting those two mixed up because it's like an entry to the card game. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Yeah, I was I was a little thrown by that as well. I was like, wait, are these the same game? Like, why is one in a little box? Um, yeah. No, awesome game.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Way to go, Asma Day. We did it. We did it. All right. For OGN, I have been Travis, he has been Clay. This has been Star Wars Battle of Hoth, a reimplementation of Memoir 44. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. We're out of the way.