Being a single parent for a good number of years puts a bit of a lock
(to say the least) on the amount of money you have to spend on games, and for
good reason, after all, the money should be going on the little tiny, and so it
was for me...
However, occasionally stores close down, and when they do, they
sometimes have sales to get rid of all the rest of their stock and you can find
yourself getting a whole lot of product for not very much money.
So it was when Electronics Boutique decided that tabletop and RPG’s
weren’t the way forwards and decided to liquidate their entire stock. It was close to my birthday and the lady I
was dating and I were both fond of games in general, so we took a visit to the
store and there she got me SLA Industries (which took up a lot more of my time
over the years than what I bought), and I bought the big box set of Legions of
Steel...
Mainly because I thought I could use the tiles to expand on space hulk
without having to get another copy of it...
Legions of Steel was a good attempt at creating a game that would rival
the concept of Space Hulk without implicitly stating that it was a copy of it,
because although Games workshop were far less lawsuit happy than they are now,
they’d still have a go if they thought they could get away with it. So, for a fiver, I got the box set, which had
all these tiles
All these figures
And then all I had to do was find someone to play it with...
This proved more difficult...
The problem wasn’t that the game was badly done, it had good production
values, tiles were good and the general level of detail was more than fine to
get a good game going. The problem was
that it didn’t grab peoples imagination in the same way that things like Space
Hulk (borne of Rogue Trader, which my circle of friend loved) did, and it
didn’t have the same level of product support that those games did, which was a
problem in and of itself, because once you’d played the basic game a few times,
you ran out of options to play, and when you figured the mechanics of the game
out, there were very easy ways for anyone playing the droids to just overrun
all the marines without any serious effort.
So I believe that in total, I’ve played it maybe four times, and at
least one of those was a theoretical run through to see if there was any way in
which a line of marines could reasonably stop the spiky death fiend (which we’re
assured was a mark 1 version, really don’t want to meet the mark 2 or 3), which
ended in a lot of dead marines really quickly.
However, the game mechanics themselves are effectively those of Space
Hulk (down to renaming Command points as Leadership points), but the weapon
mechanics are different (worse) and that’s probably why...
a)
It never really caught on as much as it could
have done.
b) No
one from GW sued them
So my copy needed to be dusted off before I could take
photos of it, but it was fun for a short while, and given that all gamers are
reasonably resourceful, when you look at it, plenty of tiles for larger space
hulk boards, and I didn’t have to buy necrons for quite some time...
