The Components

Air Pack comes in a half-height square box full of components:

Planes: You'd think that planes would be the heart of this expansion. They're actually just a tiny part of it. However there are eight different planes appropriate for the era, including the British Spitfire, the Japanese Zero, the American P38, and others. Each one is a painted plastic model that also comes with a plastic stand that's used to lift it up in the air. They all look quite nice, as depicted in the nearby photo.

Cardboard Bits: There are 60 new double-sided terrain tiles which fill in a lot of the gaps in the M44 set of tiles. In particular there are a lot of winter tiles and desert tiles, to help you fill out previous expansions.There are also trenches, airfields, and gullies. None of this is new, but it'll all help you lay out great-looking terrains for all your M44 games. As we'll see, they also start fulfilling the Air Pack's purpose as the ultimate M44 expansion.

Other new cardboard bits include: bomb craters, exit markers (now used to mark VP conditions in several scenarios), more winter field bunkers and dragon's teeth, an aircraft carrier, and a destroyed bridge. The most notable new elements are some "take-off" markers for pre-positioned airplanes and 6 new landing craft pieces.

These are all sturdy and linen textured.

Cards: There are 120 new helper cards, which are the first truly joyful element in the game. These contain the rules for every single terrain, troop type, and everything else ever released for the game.These cards are what I've been wanting since the first new expansion for M44 was released, because they provide the quick lookup of all the more exotic terrains and troops from the expansions, using the great card styles seen in the original game (but now cleaned up and looking even spiffier). The cards are all stiff, untextured cardstock.

Rulebook: The last element of the game is the 80 page full-color rulebook. It contains rules for airplanes and an explanation of all the other components, but the heart of the rules is the other thing that I've been wanting since the expansions started to come out: a reprinting of all the official scenarios for M44. This includes 34 for the Western Front, 8 for the Mediterranean, 11 for the Eastern Front, and 11 for the Pacific, for 64 total. This includes the hard-to-get scenarios from magazines, as well as all the scenarios originally found in expansions.

The scenarios are all organized by location and date, and they now use all of the rules and terrains found in later supplements, truly updating the entire system. Thus, for example, the infamous Pegasus Bridge now uses the Night Attack rules and the brand-new Air Strike rules. Omaha Beach includes landing craft and a boat at sea. Njmegen Bridges contains a railroad.

Overall, Air Pack may be the best expansion I've ever seen for a board game. It brings together every past Memoir '44 supplement with a thoughtfulness and overall vision that typically isn't seen in board game expansion design.

In looking at not just the quality of the components, but also the vision of what this supplement contains, it's clear that it earns a "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

The only really new gameplay in Air Pack centers around the airplanes.

Airplane Types: As noted, there are 8 types of planes. Which ones are available to which armies at which times are carefully noted in the rules and on helper cards describing the plane. Whenever a player brings a plane on the board, he picks among the ones appropriate for the era.

Air Sorties: The airplane rules start off with new Air Sortie cards, which are required to bring planes onto the board. They're uniquely displayed face-up when you receive them--usually at the start of the game, but sometimes after a draw. They may be played by themselves, or alongside a section card. When they bring a plane on the board, it can come from any edge and does a first turn of movement.

Replacement Sorties. In various scenarios, some other cards might be playable as Air Sorties. The old Air Power card always is.

Plane Movement: A plane moves up to 4 hexes during a turn. It's unaffected by terrain and can fly over, but not end on, occupied hexes.

Later Rounds of Movement. After its first round of movement, an airplane may be moved on later turns by normal command cards or via additional Air Sortie cards. If a plane is ever not moved on a turn, it's immediately removed from the board.

Air Check. When a plane is moved without benefit of an Air Sortie card, it must make an Air Check. You roll a number of dice based on the terrain (0 or more), plus one for each adjacent enemy unit. If you roll a grenade your airplane is destroyed and your opponent gets a medal if one of his units contributed to the Air Check.

Air Battle Special Actions: Each plane has one or more special powers which may be used. Strafing is the most common, available to all planes except the German Storch. The powers are:

• Strafing. Allows the plane to make attacks during its movement, much like the old Air Power card did.
• Ground Support: Negates the terrain protection of adjacent enemy units.
• Ground Interdiction: Allows a plane to keep adjacent enemy units from moving.
• Kamikaze Attack: Potentially destroys an enemy unit, but at the cost of the plane.
• Recon: Allows you to draw an extra card, as per the normal "Recon" rules, if your plane is next to an enemy unit.
• Rescue: Allows you to remove a single-figure unit from the board without giving your opponent a medal.

Other Rules: There are also rules including for using aircraft carriers and for planes starting out pre-positioned on the ground in a scenario.

Relationships to Other Games

Air Pack is a supplement to Memoir '44. It builds on all the other supplements to date, revamping the scenarios of each for use with newer terrains and medals, particularly those of the Terrain Pack. You also get more desert terrain for the Terrain Pack, more winter terrain for Eastern Front.

Air Pack does such a nice job of rounding out everything to date that I would have guessed that it was intended to be the final Memoir '44 expansion ... except that I've started to hear rumors of British expansions and other possibilities, so I guess we can just call it a great capstone to what's been produced to date.

The Game Design

The game design of the Air Pack begins with all the effort spent on cleaning up updating the previous expansions. Besides, as I noted, the general rewriting of the past scenarios there's also been some attention paid to standardizing actions and vocabulary, making Memoir '44 all-around a cleaner, better developed game.

Beyond that, the most obvious design work in the game relates to the airplanes.

They're a nice extension to the system. With each player having just one model on the board at a time, I wasn't expecting them to be that big of a deal, but they're actually quite powerful, and thus you'll spend a lot of tactical effort keeping their planes aloft. This is nice because it provides a contrast to one of the standard tactics of pushing hard on the same flank: now you have to figure out how that correlates with your air strength, and whether you'll have to eventually give one up in support of the other.

The different planes having different powers is another nice tactical element, because you can often decide which of a couple of planes to bring on the board, and you'll choose depending on what you think your current needs are. Overall, the planes are a fun but not overpowering addition to Memoir '44 that adds a new (yet often, optional) dimension to the gaming.

Combining that with the great work spent cleaning up the whole system gives Air Pack a clear "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Memoir '44s Air Pack shows how expansions should be designed. It provides a superb capstone to the Memoir '44 system to date, polishing up every game system and every mechanic to a gleaming sheen, yet at the same time provides just enough that's entirely new--via the airplane rules--to seem exciting and innovative as well.