A few years back, two good friends got me this, and through one thing or another (as often happens with games) I never got around to playing it, but it was always there waiting for me. This week, on the fortnightly visit to those friends, I took it with me and John and I worked through it.
For those not familiar, Death Angel is Space Hulk plotted out using cards rather than boards and miniatures, the question for us was whether or not a two dimensional structure showing pictures would have the same feel on it as the aforementioned boards and miniatures.
As it turns out, no...
It was better...
The opening stage of the game is to choose the teams of marines going in, each player chooses a team of two marines with three cards, if you're playing with fewer players, each player may choose more than one team. Those teams are laid out in a line like this...
Each marine has an arrow pointing the direction they are facing, to this are added the location cards for the area of the hulk that you're in.
These sections govern not only where the Genestealers will emerge from but also from which side, as evidenced above, the marines at the top of the stack are facing in the wrong direction...
Not good...
At the top of the board is placed the location card which indicates where to place the hulk sections and also how many genestealers are on each side. These are deployed in the Genestealer main phase.
Players take one order card from the three they have for each team of marines and play it, that card cannot be played twice in a row, then the orders are resolved from lowest rating to highest, defensive moves tend to be lower in order than offensive moves, allowing for very tactical play if you work together.
And death if you don't...
Order cards come in three flavours, Attack, Support, and Move and Activate.
When you play Attack, you get to attack in the direction you're facing, up to the number of places in the formation indicated on your marine card. Two as an average, three for the assault cannon, zero for the assault terminators. Most attack cards allow special attacks of some sort. When attacking, you roll the die, any result of a skull kills a Genestealer.
When you play Support, you place a support token on any marine in the formation, and then play the move indicated, usually providing some sort of defensive bulwark towards the onslaught.
When you play Move and Activate, you may move the members of the squad that played the card one space up or down the formation and turn their facing if you choose. Then there are additional moves that are made per the text on the card.
When you've resolved your actions, it's the genestealers attack phase. Combat is simple affair, revolving around the single die. If you roll equal to or under the number of Genestealers at a location, the marine at that location is killed. Special cards allow certain defenses (more on this later), and support tokens allow rerolls, which are always best to be used.
When the card is drawn, you carry out the action and then place Genestealers equal to the number indicated on the bottom of the card in the places located (one on Red and Orange on the card indicated), then play returns to choosing the next marine action cards.
When all the stealers on either side of the board have been deployed, the marines have met their objective and travel. Travelling causes all the current board locations to be replaced with new locations (the stealers stay where they were), and new stealers to be deployed at the top of the board.
This can lead to marines being very overwhelmed by an unanticipated travelling move.
When the marines have moved through all the areas in the location deck (four cards in the formation we played), they encounter the Broodlords in the hive. Broodlords cannot be killed until all the other stealers in their section have been killed, and they lower the dice rolls by one when rolling to kill marines.
By this time, we were down to two marines and prayers...
Sometimes however, the Emporer lends his divine guidance...
Yes, he got that many in a single combat, including one of the Broodlords.
We prevailed, but by the narrowest margin, and while it's not the same as playing with miniatures, it far better captures the feel of the marines being flanked on all sides, a concept difficult to put across when you can see everything on the board. In this game, when a Genestealer flanks you, you just put it on the opposite side and keep going, rather than trying to figure out how it got there when you had your lines clearly covered.
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| The hall of heroes unforgotten... |