Warning: Sea of text painted on a wall of text. Short version: Fun game, lot of little things to use for tactics throughout the game
A game we thought would be over in 2 hours but almost four hours later we were a little over half way though we called it early since I needed to leave (So you’re first game you might take longer to get the rules down). It was a conflict between Space Marines (Ultra Marines) played by me and the & Orc Boyz played by my friend and the game owner. I had fun and I'll leave my biggest pet peeve, possibly just me being stupid till the end. We screwed up a few things which we fixed as we realized and in truth there are probably a few more we didn’t notice. But we had fun.
Setup:
You pick your faction out of the four basic ones in the box for now, out of the four, Space Marines, Orcs, Chaos, Eldar I can only speak about the ones we played really since we didn’t look at the rest of the stuff.
After picking faction you 'shuffle' for lack of better term the board tiles and deal a predetermined amount to players probably depending on the total number of players, you take turns placing tiles (1st player goes first) puts one tile down first and you keep doing back and forth until you're out of tiles and you are done with placing tiles, this is your game board for the game (the two sides were different and I had no idea what the symbols on planets meant so I put my tiles out with more Skulls cus those are always good right and gave myself the full variety of red symbols on the tiles I could have out, more on this later). Also you can’t have a long corridor of cards 1xMany long when playing, I wasn’t sure it had to be a rectangle or not either though but that’s the shape we end up with. After that we took turns putting down our units and then warp storms (areas you can’t move through).
Forgot to mention objective tokens we had two each the other player placed with their tiles, you need to grab these to win or destroy all your opponents stuff I guess is the long way to win. I tried to place my opponent’s as far away from his starting troops and area as possible. We never really got into combat over the objectives in the first four hours though.
Reading my stuff cus I have no idea what I’m doing:
Playing the Ultramarines I had the ability to upgrade one scout (lowest ground unit) to a Space Marine (we figured it was a scout company being upgraded to an entire chapter of space marines though since it was planetary scale control) Or a Space Marine to a Land Raider (biggest ground unit with the exception of the titans) when I dominate an area (Dominate is one of the order tokens you play, with a total of four each turn) for 1 credit of materia (money). Since having bigger units is always better having small units out in the field that get promoted without having to build them at a factory (only place you can get units normally) to me is pretty powerful, you don’t have to pay full cost, or move them out into the board so it saves you time and money. The Orcs can buy a new low level unit and place it anywhere they want on a friendly world I forget the conditions. We found out from reading my sheet and asking dumb questions two things, you can only upgrade one of your scouts in a region not all for 1 each (if you have four scouts and I Dominate the area I can only upgrade one to a space marine not all… cus that in truth sounds even more broken.) The other is since I was upgrading the Space Marines it bypassed the build requirement of having 1 city. (my next turn I built a city thought just in case although that is slightly backwards). Since it was the special I figure this is what you build tactics around, constantly upgrading troops, I veered away from this towards the halfway point when we ended the game do to other things going on..
First turn Gameplay
Dominate gives you all the red seal symbols on friendly planets in that region you control (by friendly I mean you have units on a planet that have guns and such so you can take the planet’s stuff). It was my first move so I could upgrade a scout to a space marine, there were orcs in the neighboring region so bulking up my forces was probably a good idea (there was a warp storm between us but where that went and when I had no idea). I also got a hammer token (needed for your really big space and ground unit). I found you don’t get money until the end of your turn so spending down during your turn and leaving enough to add to your payout at the end of the turn for you purchase next turn is how money management goes for me. Looking at planets that gave money I realized I would be getting more money each turn and I could dominate to get hammers to get the big boys rolling out plus upgrade units each turn at least two on the cheap. I found out what the other red symbols were during his turn (you take turns pulling order tokens unless you don’t have a play, I’ll get into that later.)
He dominated as well but unlike the Hammer token he had a double cog to which I asked if that meant it was money (I think he realized I wanted to attack those planets since he could get money from them and I wanted money and had to wait). When he said they were discount tokens for purchases I had to ask if he meant permanently since there were two he could basically pop out free units. It turns out it was more like a voucher or coupon on your next purchase of a unit/structure so I frowned a bit since I wanted coupons too (that’s what I asked if it was like and he said yes so that’s what I called them for the rest of the game, I found out the Imperial eagle logo red seal was a wild card from what he told me and I could ask for any token (the other one I learned about was a rally token which you can put into battle and it would sub for one of your 0 city units , I spent the next few turns dominating on this planet… twice each turn.
Oh crap moments and Oooooooh moments.
So we didn’t know you flip an event card regardless of if you play a strategize card or not every turn and the warpstorms move…
Here’s my best peeve, I couldn’t figure out which way I was supposed to move the move the warpstorms. I’d constantly have to ask the other guy does it move this way or this way?
An Oh crap moment was the realization that not only can you stack orders on a tile it resolves last in last out so if the other player puts a token over yours for an order you have to wait for them to remove it before you can do anything. This means you might be doing three actions in a row before the other guy does the order he really wants to. I wanted to build the largest space ships since I had the amount of materia. The other guy opted to attack with two space ship versus my one before I got a chance to build two large battle barges for my space marines.
This was the first combat and there were a lot of questions. Like how come I was rolling the same amount of dice to the opponent (Space Orks aren’t that great at Space Combat) turns out my one space marine ship was as strong as his two. How do you win combat? It’s three rounds you roll the dice once for the whole thing and it stays that way unless there’s some special thing that happens. Each round you play a card and the attacker reveals first. Also I forgot to mention the order (don’t know if we did it right).
Attacker swoops in with their units (Either Space or Ground can’t do both on an order), you pull the units and figure out how many dice you’re rolling and you roll. Determine if you’d like a reinforcement token (it’ll die at the end of combat). Now Round #1 you both place a card it can have extra bolters (1 Attack each), shields (1 Defense each), or an eagle, what you need to win. Combat ends two ways, you kill all the other troops before the end of the third round or you have at least one not routed troop and more morale (routed drops don’t count for morale). I was a little nervous since the other guy’s cards had a lot of symbols on each, plus a special ability, there was also a combo if you has a type of unit in play for combat that allowed a third thing to happened.
The short version is I won combat so he’s forces that didn’t get destroyed moved back into his region of control they came from that was adjacent. My turn to use an order… I built two very large ships then started looking at his homeworld and asked what kind of resources he had there. He scrambled to grab hammer tokens to build things now to mount a defense. In doing so he left one of his friendly works that had 1/3 of his income I attacked the other major money world he had the following turn.
We ended early but I for the most part stalled his war chest and kept attacking him with bigger forces. Turns out the skulls where how many things a factory can produce and how many units a planet can have on it. Also ground troops can move between planets if they’re adjacent meaning what side you put your planets on for money and red seals plus how you place them, you can stop ground troops from attacking you if you box them out with space on the regional tile as a defensive buffer (I wasn’t this smart, I actually blocked off my own troops from the rest and with a warp storm next to them there was no invading the neighboring close planet. Between having ground troops that I could upgrade quickly on the cheap, a whatever I want token planet to plunder, boxing his forces in with warpstorms we never got into a large fight, I did find using a strategize to bluff an attack in a neighboring region was effective since he’d move troops in so I wouldn’t steam roll him, that meant I could purchase something (I caped my money track btw), get him to burn an order moving someplace I wouldn’t attack that was his and pulled his forces away from where I could attack.
I thnk for the Space Marines building up your economy machine to setup and arm so you can keep attacking is a good tactic, you just have to watch the planets since your’re limited to how many units can leap frog planets on a move if they’re smaller limits in which case a bottleneck defense can occur if you retreat your units to a larger world with say four skulls and than retake your planet once there’s only two units there (you’d loose troops though so just attack with a strong force and reinforcement tokens or units you can afford to loose). There’s a lot of little things we noticed after we placed that get dialed into your tactics, also I noticed Orcs start with better cards than Space Marines in my opinion if you want to turn them into green paste it would have been hard, if you want to drop some of them for the morale hit and turtle for the most part each round so you win combat overall I think this is a lot easier to do.
