Space Hulk

If badass were boxed, it would be Space Hulk.

If R Lee Ermey plays games, it's Space Hulk.

(My next comparison would relegate this review to RSP, so just use your imagination and fill in a semi-obscene reference.)

Back when I was in college, must have been about 1986, we wasted hours upon hours on things like Space Hulk and BattleTech. Good times... Good times...

They say you can't go home. Well, they never said anything about home coming back to you and beating the snot from your eyeballs because not once did you write a postcard. Cuz that's what the new version of Space Hulk does.

And it does it with steel tipped boots while chomping on a cigar rolled in the blood of its enemies.

If you're going to complain about the price of this monolithic masterpiece, take the long walk down washout lane, brother, and read no further. This is about a guts and testosterone cocktail. Penny pinchers need not apply. For the record, I paid $80. With unwashed cash I kept wadded in my mud caked boot next to my knife.

And in that glossy box (What the hell? Who decided on a high gloss box? Shut up. This is Space Hulk.) there's components the likes of which have rarely been seen.

Playing with the components of Space Hulk is more fun than playing most games on BGG.

The board bits are constructed out of some unbelievably thick cardboard of the gods or something. And laminated. No doubt so blood and tears wipe off easily. In a strange new twist, the board components are also embossed with indentations to make certain features pop out, much like the covers of some books have. The components punch out super clean, despite the absurd thickness.

And then the minis. Sweet mammajamma, the box should come with a warning. This is NOT FOR INEXPERIENCED MODELLERS. There's a lot of drop dead gorgeous miniatures with detail bordering on manic, and they have been created to be assembled in astounding ways. Just the way these suckers fit together is an engineering achievement. To take a sprue that is essentially flat and come up with the multilayered and multiplane models is breathtaking. No, really. The science of their construction is beautiful. These are 100% the highest quality plastic miniatures I have ever seen. Yeah, OK, the Genestealer beasts are often attached to a piece of architecture, but it isn't important once the blood and ichor start flowing.

The assembly does take some time (a task I truly enjoy), and it will require some proper tools (sharp knife, bandaids), but that's for a different piece.

Many will paint their super armored Terminators (no relation to Governator) and Genestealers. I may get around to it if a few days pass without playing. So, probably not for a long while.

You also get some fairly plain six sided dice. OK, they have a slight mottled color, but with everything else this game has, I expected them to be carved from sabertooth skulls or something.

The rule book and mission books are full of illustrations and flavor text and stories and background so oozing in machismo that you can smell the armpit sweat.

600 years ago, some daft order of space marines took a beating at the hands of the genestealers. Now, they swear revenge. No retreat, no surrender. This game is a 600 year long pissing match. This is about man's honor, and nothing more. This is proving how hard you can punch.

Booyah.

So with each scenario, you layout a map as described in the mission book (12 missions, very replayable). In the beginning, the maps are only about 2' by 3'. Then comes mission #2. This is where you find the true cost of this game - the new table you need.

You get a sprawling gothic beautiful map of tiny corridors. See, terminators are so freakin huge, they have to walk single file. Same for the multi limbed stealers. This creates marches of death towards each other.

Terminators are slow. Painfully slow. Frozen honey slow. They get 4 actions per guy per turn. That action can be things like take ONE step and shoot, just shoot, just move or just TURN 90 degrees. Only 4 actions, and TURNING is an action. These dudes are slow.

The genestealers, they get 6 actions, turns are essentially free. They zip along the corridors, soon pouring clawful death upon the terminators.

To make up for this, the Marines get some random number of Action Points they can spend extra on those dudes who really need it. And as Termies die, you spread these bonus command points among fewer guys, so when it's that last 1 or 2, those guys are in hyperdrive trying to save their armored butts with extra actions, practically sprinting down hallways.

These extra actions can also be used on the opponent's turn. Or you can set a terminator in Overwatch, to shoot the first thing he sees moving on the enemy turn.

Different marines have different weapons that have nicely different effects. Your standard guy rolls 2 dice to shoot his gun and if either is a 6, he kills it. Other weapons add plusses, dice, area effect and other cool goodies.

In hand to hand to claw combat, a marine rolls a die and a genestealer rolls 3. Highest single die wins. Genestealers have no ranged weapons. 

So the marines are terribly slow, but can kill at range. Genestealers are zippy and devastating in close combat, but have to get there.

The Genestealers make up for this by being blips on a radar. Blips are cardboard tokens out of line of sight that exist simply to make the marine player even more annoyed. A single blip might be 1, 2 or 3 genestealers. So, hidden around that corner is a room. Might be 3 genestealers. Might be 9. Makes planning a little guesswork and a little gut work. Is that blip attacking that separated marine a single, (who cares) genestealer, or is it 3 that will probably shred him?

To make things more annoying, here's a timer for the marines. You've got somewhere between 3 and 3.5 minutes to execute your turn. Mistakes get made when you have 5 guys all seperated and all desperate. You use action points you wished you saved. You forget to put guys into Guard (hand to hand bonuses). 

And more Genestealers keep coming.

As a genestealer player, you are sometimes the cat, sometimes the mouse. Trying to surround the marines, force them to separate, coming at different angles, forcing them to turn, and inevitably, as genestealers crumble to the floor repeatedly, eventually getting one in and tearing a terminator to tiny armored meatballs.

Genestealers come in huge numbers. They die. A lot. But the genestealer player will laugh and shrug. It isn't a dead genestealer. It's one less action point from the marines.

The missions vary from "get this guy there" to "Kill this guy" to "Kill em all". The maps are varied, sometimes forcing Genestealers to rush headlong to the marines and die in droves, sometimes making them hang out around the next corner.

The game feels desperate, like no other game has ever achieved.

The stories the games play out before you are of heroic deaths, skin of the teeth escapes and massive carnage. That first kill when a terminator rolls poorly. That one damn genestealer who runs a whole corridor unscathed. The terminator who is surrounded by 3 and kills them all. Each game is full of story points. Tension. Anguish. Living the tale.

You do not end a game of space hulk by counting victory points and saying "good game". You end with that final shot, the final attack that overwhelmed the impossible, and the cry of victory from one side as the other swears revenge. In less than 600 years.

There's more. There's psychics and parrying swords and closing doors before an enemy reaches you and all that. But do yourself a favor and just buy the game and find it all for yourself.

TLDR: Extravagant and Classic Bug Hunt with minis