[agoodall]

I'm a long time grognard, but I happen to love the Command and Colors series. My 9 year old and I played a game last week of Memoir '44 and it was a blast. It was a tense game that was decided on the last unit activation of his turn (and if he hadn't won it then, I'd likely have won the next turn).

I happen to like the cards aspect of the game, but then I'm a fan of fog-of-war games. Like others have pointed out, in C&C:A it seems to increase the realism.

One thing I found with Battle Cry, the long out of print American Civil War game in the family, is that while the game didn't fight like a Civil War game, the end results were often fairly realistic (as long as you didn't take casualties literally, but also considered them to represent men who ran off, or had to pull out due to a lack of ammunition, or who just stopped fighting). It's also the first game I've seen that makes some of the more lopsided battles fun to play.

I just don't have the patience to haul out a game and play it for six hours at a stretch, or over a long weekend, any more. C&C:A is fast to play, easy to teach, and is now my go-to game.