This week, my players and I took a break from our new World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign and tried out Space Hulk. I mean of course the first edition from 1989, not these degenerate modern versions. Because I’m classy and old school. Also, later editions tend to cram more and more stuff in until it makes my head hurt, whereas early editions are still basic enough that you can see the general idea behind it.
So, Space Hulk takes place in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, but cuts it down to a manageable chunk by involving only a battle between Blood Angel Space Marines and Genestealers on board a giant floating derelict. One player controls the Marines, another controls the Stealers, and you play one of a number of existing missions with particular maps and victory conditions for each side. We played the very first mission in the book, Suicide Mission (setting the tone nice and grimdark right from the start!), in which the Marines have to advance to a Control Room and fire a flamer at it to win. The Genestealers, meanwhile, win if the Marine carrying the flamer is killed.
The rules of the game are… relatively simple. The Marine player has either five or ten models that all get placed on the map before the game begins. Of those, in in five is a Sergeant, and one in five if a Flamer Marine. The Stealer player starts out with a certain number of “blips” (as in, “Brother-Sergeant, I have a blip on the auspex! The vile xenos are approaching!”) and will get more in reinforcements each turn. A blip can be converted into 1-3 Genestealer on any turn before it has moved, and also gets forcibly converted if a Marine ever has line of sight to it.
Each piece gets a number of Action Points at the start of its player’s turn – Marines get 4 AP, and Genestealers get 6. 1 AP lets you take a step forward, attack an enemy model that’s standing in front of you, open or close a door, or turn around (a Genestealer pays 1 AP to turn around fully, while the Marines in their bulky Terminator armour has to pay 1 AP for each 90-degree turn). Blips don’t need to turn, but otherwise move like the others. You can also take a step backward for 2 AP.
Marines who aren’t Flamer Marines can also fire their stormbolters, at the cost of 1 AP per shot. They can shoot at any Genestealer or door that is within their forward arc. They roll 2d6, and if either die is a 6, they destroy what they shot at. If they stand still and shoot at the same target several times in a row, their accuracy increases with every shot, so they hit on 5+ with their second shot and 4+ with their third and every shot onward. They can also fire while taking a step forward, but if so they don’t get the bonus for repeated shots.
The most powerful weapon in the Marines’ arsenal, however, is the ability to set up overwatch at the cost of 2 AP. A Marine stays in overwatch until the end of the next Stealer turn, and during that time he automatically fires at any Stealer who moves within 12 squares in his firing arc, as long as he has an unbroken line of sight to it. He still only hits at a roll of 6, and he doesn’t get any bonus for sustained fire, so it’s a little unreliable on short distances, but a Stealer who tries to charge more than three squares or so towards an overwatching Marine is pretty much definitely gonna die. However, if he ever rolls a double with his 2d6, his bolter jams, he drops out of overwatch, and he’ll need to spend 1 AP next turn to clear it before he can fire again. So overwatch isn’t quite foolproof – if the Stealer has enough models to send at an overwatching Marine, he can bring him down through sheer weight of numbers!
Both Stealers and Marines can attack in close combat for 1 AP, but Marines almost never have a reason to do so, since Stealers are a lot better at it. When a Stealer and a Marine fight, the Stealer rolls 3d6 and takes the highest result, while a Marine rolls 1d6. The one who rolls higher kills the other, unless it was attacked to the side or the back, in which case the attacker survives and the defender instead automatically turns to face him. Basically, if a Stealer gets up close and personal to a Marine, then the Marina is gonna die. The Sergeant has +1 to his roll in close combat, but still, his odds aren’t great.
The Flamer Marine works a little differently. He doesn’t have a storm bolter but instead carries a flamer, with which he can fire at a room or corridor that is within 12 squares in his forward arc and that he has an unbroken line of sight to. Everything in that section catches fire and the Marine player rolls 1d6 for any model within it; on a roll of 2+, that model dies. Also, the flames make the room impassable until the end of the next Stealer turn. It’s crazy powerful, but it costs 2 AP to fire and the Flamer only has 6 shots, after which it’s useless. If the Flamer Marine has at least 1 shot left, he can also set the Flamer to self-destruct, in which case he and everything in the same section as him dies. This was obviously not an option in the mission we played since the Marine player loses immediately if the Flamer Marine dies, but it’s still a nice touch. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium, after all!
Finally, the Marine player gets between 1 and 6 Command Points every turn. Command Points can be used in the same way as Action Points, except any Marine can use them. They can even be used in the Stealer turn, to give a Marine an action of any sort every time a Stealer moves within his line of sight (which is larger than his forward arc, encompassing a full 180 degrees in front of him). So for instance, a Marine whose bolter jams during overwatch can spend 1 CP to clear out the jam, then spend 1 CP to fire at a Stealer, as long as the Stealer has to move twice before reaching him.
That’s about it (wow, is that all?). We had to work with some house rules since we were setting up an improvised board on Roll20 instead of using the actual, physical game. CP is meant to be generated by drawing a tile out of a cup and kept secret from the Stealer player, but we rolled a 1d6 in the open instead. Also, each blip has the number of Stealer models it will turn into written on the bottom, so the Stealer player will know what it is but the Marine player won’t, but we just rolled 1d3 every time a blip got converted. Some strategy got lost there, but since it was our first time playing, making it less complicated wasn’t a bad thing. We also forewent the rule that says that the Marine player only gets 3 minutes to carry out her entire round, because seriously, that’s way too stressful. The rules do oh-so-kindly mention that a beginner gets extra time, but all in all, bugger that. The Marines already have a steeper learning curve than the Stealers, there’s no reason to make it even worse.
All in all, I think it played pretty well. The first match ended with a Stealer victory, while the second one had to be cancelled since Roll20 crapped out on us, but I think we all learned as we went along. The game certainly has a lot of flavour – you can just feel how unwieldy and overwhelmed the Marines are, and how at once squishy and deadly the Stealers are. The way that Stealers can build up their forces (and will usually have to, since a lot of Stealers will have to charge into enemy fire when overrunning a Marine position) while the Marines are stuck with what they’ve got really sells the feeling of creeping menace, of the Marines moving through a hostile environments where sudden death is always lurking just out of sight.
And I got to say, it’s nice to get back to the strategy-board-game roots of roleplaying sometimes. So many legacy aspects of the hobby are there because it started out as a way of simulating large-scale battles on a tabletop, and I think that’s something anyone who wants to design a game system had better remember. There’s a reason why my two favourite systems are Savage Worlds (which leans into the miniature-board-game experience) and Powered by the Apocalypse (which attempts to break with it entirely and create a functional game that’s about storytelling instead of strategy). It pays to know what the parts you’re using were originally meant for.
Plus, it’s still damn awesome to shooty-bang-bang and make aliens go splat! Hey, I never denied that I’m permanently twelve years old on the inside.