Saturday, January 29, 2011

Huge Space Hulk, Tiny Rule

My wife and I have been playing a lot of Space Hulk: Death Angel in the past week or two. It's an awesome version of the classic Space Hulk board game / miniatures game, but in a portable semi-cardgame edition. (It's clearly a card game, but doesn't feel or play like one.) Best of all, it's cooperative. My wife and I play the Space Marines together, and the game itself controls the vile genestealers. Good times.

I was going to write a detailed review, but in the middle of writing it, I noticed a rule we were doing wrong. So, now I need to play a few more games with that rule correct before I can weigh in with my final thoughts. Normally, I'd just blame FFG, their rulebooks are always so poorly written. But in this case, the rulebook is actually really good and simple, I just somehow missed a critical sentence. A tiny little innocuous sentence, which no doubt completely skewed game balance. My bad.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's the rule? We've been playing Death Angel, and we always lose.

rbbergstrom said...

We somehow missed the rule that each location card could only be activated once per turn. It resulted in about twice as many counters on doors as there should be. It also made at least one of the final rooms much easier - we'd activate the control panel two or three times a turn at the end.

Anonymous, are you playing with 3 players? One thing I noticed was that it's MUCH easier with 2 players than 3. The reason being the little triangles that determine how many monsters spawn. On the 2- or 4-player airlock, the triangles spawn 3 and 1 blips. On the 3- and 6-player airlock, they spawn 5 and 3. So you've got +50% more marines, but they have to face +100% more genestealers (on average).

Anonymous said...

Yup, three players. Interesting!