Me and Dave hadn’t played this for a while so we got it out as our ‘Main Event’ game last week. It was a typical bloodthirsty affair but as it had been so long since we last played it back in March, we could approach it from a fresh angle of tactics.
Dave went first as the Terminators. With a few good draws in his command points, he decided to leave behind a rear guard and use the rest of his Terminators to ‘run it up the middle.’ His tactic was to get as many of his Terminators as he possibly could to the crossroads that would give him a clear run to the objective that he had to flame. Despite my initial attack on the Sergeant at the front using around 3 or 4 Genestealers, the combat prowess of the Sergeant proved to be too much for them and he cut through the first wave quite easily. He used the Flamer to block off his rear, so that my Genestealers couldn’t get to him without flaming themselves. It might have worked, but for one obscure rule that Dave either didn’t know about or had forgotten – you can move and shoot as part of the same action. So he might not have needed to use so many action/command points to get the doors open, and might even have got the final doors open had he remembered, just by shooting them off. Whether he’d have got a flamer down there is anyone’s guess, because I had swarmed the area by then and cut most of his guys to pieces. Of course, when the Flamer falls, it’s all over, and this is how the game ended for Dave.
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| "You can't live without the fire; it's the heat that makes you strong.." |
I had no such problems with the rules and did try the ‘run it up the middle’ strategy again, but without a rear guard and unfortunately I wasn’t very lucky with the command points so there weren’t that many extra actions my guys could do. Nonetheless, I made it right up to the crossroads at the end of the bottleneck, but I couldn’t get the door open and got swarmed by the mass of Genestealers Dave had amassed up there by then. He had apparently forgotten about my exposed rear, but that didn’t matter since I had all the Terminators in the same place anyway; Dave ran through most of them with considerable ease. Finally I started to get a bit more lucky with the command points, and engaged in a last desperate tactic of flaming one side of me, flaming the other, then running through the flames to make a dash for the objective. Needless to say, it was all over as soon as Brother Zael stepped in to the fire…
So, another draw, which isn’t ideal but better than the losses I’ve been amassing lately with the Horus Heresy and Thunderstone games. Next time, I might try putting a Terminator on overwatch on the left hand side of the bottleneck, to try to cut off one of the places the Genestealers can attack from and hopefully use the opportunity to get the door open to the room we have to destroy. Until then Dave, it’s another furious stalemate on the Sin of Damnation…
Just a thought that I think I’ll share with you all: Generally speaking, you need to get a six on one dice to shoot and kill a Genestealer with a Terminator. At first glance, this appears to be a bit harsh, given how good Space Marines are supposed to be. But look again… If you roll 2D6, there is a 1/3 chance that one of those dice will land on 6. If you took one shot in 40K, there’d be a 2/3 chance of a hit, and a ½ chance of a wound, which makes a 1/3 chance of a kill, so it’s actually near enough the same. Granted, in 40K Terminators would be allowed to fire twice because of their Storm Bolters, so effectively you’ve got half the chance of a kill that you would in 40K, but I would suggest that is representative of the low lighting and claustrophobic atmosphere on Space Hulk that make those targets so difficult to destroy. Maybe I think a little too much about this… but after all, those desperate, claustrophobic atmospheres are what make Space Hulk so much fun to play.
40K game coming up next…
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