Noob impressions of this game compared to HQ

[Kurgan]

[wanted to get my raw thoughts out here before doing extensive research on a game I may or may not get...]

So I've been curious about this sci-fi fantasy game for awhile and have started reading up on it recently. I am starting to see, judging by the rulebook, where a lot of homebrew ideas on the Inn for HeroQuest were adapted from this game. For instance some of the Dragon ideas are clearly drawn from the Dreadnought enemy. The Alien Event cards and some action cards used by the space marines remind me of the Combat Cards and Evil Wizard cards.

So we've got a game of space marines (like mercenary knights of the future) vs. chaos marines (chaos warriors), androids ("necron" robot skeletons, like the terminator), orks (space orcs), gretchen (space goblins) and gene stealers (multi-armed monstrosities) moving around a board made up of four boards (no modular dungeon) and some cardboard doors and things and lots and lots of tokens. It came out in 1990, but I didn't realize Space Hulk (which everyone talks about) came out first, and there was an "Advanced Space Crusade" that came out the same year (similar to how the original HeroQuest was followed by Advanced HeroQuest in '89). So kind of like the equivalent to Warhammer 40,000 what HeroQuest was to Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

I thought maybe this game wouldn't be of interest if it wasn't similar to HeroQuest in terms of simplicity and expand-ability but it looks somewhat promising. The biggest downside though seems to be its relative rarity compared to the more popular HeroQuest. It seems to sell for $250+ on ebay. I'm intrigued by the "less violent" German version known as StarQuest (with Chaos robots and zero time guns). I guess you can homebrew your lore together as you wish.

Another thing I'm wondering about is whether these 40K Orks I inherited would be "compatible" with a set. They have more dynamic poses and might be a larger scale, but I guess they could just be super ork mutants or something. But if the scale is similar I suppose a person could supplement their sets with Warhammer 40k miniatures, possibly? I see they use the slot-in-tab style miniatures with the generic black round bases also used in Advanced HeroQuest and several other tabletop games.

The dice are wooden and have 1, 2, 3, and three 0's? White dice for weak attacks and red for strong. And bolt on weapons (I hope they fit better than the HQ merc weapons!).

There's a number of missions (12?) included in the base game and expansions that introduce eldar (space elves) and gun turrets to blow up the big mechs (dreadnoughts).

I'll have to do some more research into this game. The idea of controlling a squad of generic stormtroopers seems a little boring to me vs. a group of heroes but I guess it isn't that more annoying than having a bunch of mercenaries as you would in the later quests. And the idea that the "Alien Player" (the equivalent of Zargon) is trying to score points to rank up and win ahead of the space marines is kind of a cool thing.

I am also thinking those plastic styrene bases that are used to hold the counters (represented by switches) might not hold up well over time.

But back to the number of figures. It looks like there are about twice as many bad guys as good. There are only four players this time instead of five, and one person controls all the aliens while the rest each control five marines (four regular grunts and their leader), but if you are missing human players you don't have those extra guys. Still, I could imagine a game lasting a long time with each playing have to manage at least 5 characters. But then if each marine has just two weapons (his chosen bolt on weapon and melee... or just melee in one case) and there are no magic spells to worry about, maybe it wouldn't take that long. BGG estimates 2 hours for a typical game. But then you have the cards to play too. I'd have to see it in action I guess.

If it's fun to play, that's the real reason to own it. I've now heard from several people who owned it but never or rarely played it. I wonder why?

Any helpful hints for a beginner here on where to get started?

[Anderas]

Owner of the game here.

The Alien Event cards and some action cards used by the space marines remind me of the Combat Cards and Evil Wizard cards.

We said we miss that mechanic in HQ so we implemented it. And then we got creative.

Space Crusade has a number of problems. But there was an upside: It was the source for the mercenary system in HQ, later. Because that part was good, apparently.

Problems are:
1. The game doesn't really scale with the players.
Yes I know you are supposed to use more blips if there are more marine players, but no, it doesn't scale. A single marine player dies by just using the event deck. Two marine players play more or less balanced. Three marine players just flatten the Chaos player with very few losses, if any. Worse, the Event Card Deck is really bad for a single player because he takes longer to achieve the mission, and less bad for three players because they fulfill the mission in 5-6 rounds; so that's inverse balancing. So I proposed some solutions, including event cards that scale per Marine Player. Like "Place one Genestealer next to each commander" instead of "place one Genestealer"; or taking more event cards if there are more players.

2. Either the monster points or the marine points are not in the right range, but at least to me it seems as if the Marines can make much more points than the Chaos Player.

3. They lost the creativity for Mission design somewhere in the middle. I think there are two or three creative missions, all the rest is just "Go kill everyone". Well, that works better with a skirmish game like Necromunda or 40k Kill Teams, doesn't it? What was appealing to me was the fact that marines go aboard to fulfill a mission that couldn't be achieved otherwise. Kill everyone, you can play battlefleet gothic and stack some broadside markers on the shields, done. But then there was the PC game (or was it the Amiga Game?) where there were really a couple of interesting missions. I liked that one! Same for 40k:Chaos Gate which was a 90ies isometric round based computer game with the same gameplay feeling. You could cheat that game without end if you wanted, but it was fun. It was exactly that mix of RPG and tactical wargame that any heroquester would love. One game with 5 marines would take hours, but that's a price you like to pay for the fun, right?

4. Once I started to add more Orc variants to the game, I suddenly had a 40k Army. Ok, that's a personal problem of mine.

The red dice have 0,0,0,1,2,3 yes. The white ones have 0,0,0,0,1,2. I've made myself blue dice with 0,0,0,1,1,2. They sit exactly between the red and the white dice and so give a game designer the ability to invent weapon variants without end; which I used, no surprise, to add all the 40k stuff of my cupboard to the game. That includes a small imperial army, an awful lot of Orcs, a few more Chaos Marines, one unit of Necrons, some genestealers. Then I played it with myself for testing. When I was satisfied, I brought it to the 40k club, and they didn't want to try it at all. That was bad.

So I stopped again. Instead I played my Orc Army for some years, successfully.

[Kurgan]

Great to hear the feedback, so it may require some tweaking to be a good game. Question though... are the points supposed to mean the Chaos Player has an equal chance of winning as the Space Marines? Because I figured if the Alien Gm is like Zargon, his goal might be to win over the course of several missions. Or am I misunderstanding how it works? You rank up by winning the mission and you get points for killing the enemy. The space marines could suffer a total party kill, but they get another chance the next mission and so on, although every time they lose their commander figure, their stats reset back to zero (?).

Three players sounds like it could take awhile.

I toyed with using my 40K orks in a generic Capture the Flag arena, but maybe that could work with this game, it just needs some proper rules.

Are there analogs of the dice in plastic?

[Anderas]

Not an equal chance.
But if you take the Gretchins for example, they score one single dead Marine for 10 points but you need 14 of them... With a value of 28 for the Marines.

So if one would take the time and calculate all this, it would be easier for the Chaos Player to put the good number of Blips in his cache.

If the Commander dies, the new Commander starts with nothing, that's right. One of the few ways for Chaos to win from time to time.

Also, if Chaos wants to win, they put all the heavy guns in one Quarter directly at the entrance of a Marine Player. There, they're still in a pile so you can kill them all with a few shots from the heavy guns. That's not fun at all, so I think there should be some tweaking here, too.

[Kurgan]

Other than fighting and wiping out all the aliens (monsters), there doesn't seem much to do. But have people created custom quests for Space Crusade? Where are the best places to find them? I would think it could have a robust community like HeroQuest, if anybody bothered to play it of course...

I could imagine all sorts of missions.. defusing bombs, rescuing hostages, repairing equipment or holding positions, looking for lost tech, etc.

[Anderas]

The community is really small. I've made one mission, once.

The game as it is works well enough. Most interesting is probably the mission where everyone has to fight everyone because there is a virus in the hulk's air and the cure is only for one marine squad. But I think that was the computer game.

Clearly the computer game was a mission with Genestealer eggs. The Marines had to destroy them. I had to replay that mission 5 times.

I've made myself some additional ranks and orders and equipments so the game would last longer. The highest ranking commander would get the ability to give the others an order. The flamer got stronger but has just three ammo. That kind of things.

But either way you get into 40k with it. If you add monsters to the game you will have a 40k army before you turn your head twice, and once you have it, why not trying that other game?

Or the other way round, you find that the Armor Value 4 and the dice don't give enough space for customization, and when you look around you find another system that has more room for customization just around the corner in that book. Written on the title is 40k.

So 40k pretty much sucked the players out of Space Crusade. Whereas I was never able to find that gameplay with the blips and the unequal distribution of models and the sneak in and out mechanics in 40k.

Strangely the same thing did not happen with Heroquest. Many players are also in Warhammer Fantasy battle, but the exploration aspect and the half-rpg-thing of dungeon crawlers seem to give the people something that they don't get in Fantasy Battle.

The exploration aspect is less in SC. Maybe one should start to build up the game tile by tile while you progress? There could be a small cardboard arrow indicating where your scanner thinks the mission objective would be.

I miss SC.

[Kurgan]

So the game was good but not good enough and it finally accomplished their mission of just being a seduction pill into the larger budget-busting game?

Why not adapt the computer game missions that were unique to the board game?

I get what you're saying though. HeroQuest is not a wargame. If anything, that was Battlemasters. Instead you're a party of individuals wandering a dungeon (even if many of us ended up controlling four heroes vs. the monsters). Whereas here you're guaranteed to commanding a squad of five more generic soldiers.

As for adding stuff, you could always have minis stand in for other things. Why does the one gun have to only have those same values forever? You could upgrade it on their "character sheet" into something else without needing another piece of plastic. The monsters could have levels, or represent other things. We never needed a new mini to represent an Orc that had magic spells or was armed with a crossbow, right? That Chaos Warlock could be anything. All it takes is imagination. But it sounds like by that point maybe people weren't applying all their thinking caps to the game and were just willing to jump into painting and collecting, painting and collecting...?

Once you're using the figures with removable bases and such, I can see the allure. Just a little more padding here and then it will be done... or maybe a little more... well as long as I'm adding this, etc. But I'm much more about the dungeon adventure than trying to plot huge armies on giant tables... that's much more of an undertaking (having now played five Battle Masters games).

[Kurgan]

How exactly do the Alien reinforcements work?

[Anderas]

The Chaos Player places 5 chips of his choice on any square marked with R out of line if sight.
Next turn they may move.

That part with the line if sight is bothersome, because if the Marines have some soldiers left over, they can easily guard the entry points. That's specially the case if the Marines have three teams, so it's again an example of anti-balancing

[Kurgan]

I see the "wall base" plastic (furniture I guess you could call it) stand from Wizards of Morcar is re-used in one of the expansions ("Eldar Attack").

Doing my research now... so there were at least two expansions... one adds space elves as a "fifth player" (or sub for one of the Marine teams I guess, vs. the Alien GM). These guys have psychic (psyker is the 40k term?) attacks. I see White Dwarf magazine, ever eager to sell more minis, did a couple of issues on Space Crusade, introducing the idea of the "Space Marine Librarian" who also has psyker attacks (cards, which function like combat cards or magic spells I suppose). And the other big expansion gives color-coded cannon turret type weapons that you use to take down the extra large (four weapon) Dreadnought (the default one only has two clip on weapons) and some other clip on guns for the space marines too if I read that correctly.

The clip on weapons idea is cool but looks similar to the HeroQuest merc way of doing it where the "hands" are part of the model bit being connected instead of sliding a thin weapon into a hole in the hand (probably more stable idea). But as a result some people glued their figure weapons in. All the figures (except the turrets and Dreadnoughts which have square bases) use generic (black plastic) round bases as found in lots of other games.