Hulk in Space, Incredible!

We had not managed to get a “proper” game organised so as a last minute thing Rob (B) brought his Space Hulk board game. It had been years since any of us had played this but we knew it would be ideal to get a few games in on an evening as it was the older set with the egg timer for the Space Marines! (this means the Space Marine player has to make sure he has done all his moves within about 2 minutes.

Rob (B) had set up a basic scenario where 5 marines had to get through and flame a next room. They would have to fight their way through a hoard of randomly spawning Gene Stealers to do it.

The game is about as simple as it can get with a single dice roll deciding all ranged and melee combat.

Thanks to some awful rolling on the part of the Space Marines they appear to have weapons which were in fact less reliable than firearms of 40000 years previously. You would have thought in that time one would have worked on the reliability of firearms. In one turn I rolled a double 1 jamming a weapon. I then spent some action points un-jamming it only roll another double 1 and it jam again! Needless to say the unfortunate Marine’s head was soon a Gene Stealers Hat.

The Marines luck did not improve through the night and they did not manage to win one game regardless who was playing them.

Space Hulk is one of those games where the simple game play belies what is in fact quite a challenging tactical game that has more depth than I had thought previously. I think the more one plays it the more these depths would be revealed.

We managed about 5 games in 2 hours with a lot of fun and it made a nice break from the historical games we have been playing recently and the simple nature of the game allowed for a lot of trash talk and banter and general chit-chat which is after all my strong point!.

The game also got us all nostalgic about all those other games from our youth such as; Chainsaw Warrior, Judge Dredd and Car Wars.  Craig left determined to dust off his copy of Dark Future and arrange a game soon. I’m already looking forward to it.