When I started miniature gaming, Space Hulk had been out for a little while and never really caught my interest. Fast forward a bunch of years, the game is out of production, and I’m attending one of my first Gen Con’s in Indy, and I happened to catch a glimpse of a custom space hulk game going on (this was prior to me bringing a camera along with me to Gen Con unfortunately) and after seeing that, I was hooked. I’ve always wanted to get a copy of the game to see if it was worth it or not, enough so to build an elaborate, single purpose board for a game like Space Hulk. When GW announced it was releasing a new version of Space Hulk, I was pretty excited, I had spent quite a bit of time bidding on various half filled copies of the older versions, so this, to me, was an easy button.
Large Custom Space Hulk game courtesy of Kung_Fu_Fighter on www.sharkeyforums.com
I have, as of going to Adepticon this year, now played through 5-6 missions or so both as the marines and the gene-stealers. In each instance, they have been close games, giving tension to both sides in the decisions they are making. Having played this only a few times, it was easy to see what draws people back to this game. It follows 40k fluff but not the typical rule set we’re all familiar with, it’s a very simple system that involves very few stats/numbers, allowing for the game to be thought through and forcing both sides to make decisions while not entirely sure of the outcome. The fact that it does deviate from the familiar rules known in 40k and Fantasy is not an issue, it’s refreshing to know that GW can produce quick playing, non-vague rules that are easy to use. A couple of the games we have also divided the marines into 2 groups, allowing an extra player and brain does seem to add a little bit more difficulty for the gene-stealer player as 2 people working together is a pretty good advantage.
Knowing what I do know, I’m still on the fence as to weather or not I’d like to create a custom board and scenario(s) for this game unless I could somehow scale it to more than 3 players, Ideally 4-5 would be a good number for our group, so for now, this will be something on the back of my mind, and if opportunity presents itself, I could see making some rather grand sized board to play this game on.
**A couple of pictures of one round of Space Hulk during Adepticon 2011!
