Space Hulk – Death Angel The Card Game Reviewed

Game Name: Space Hulk – Death Angel The Card Game

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Designer: Corey Konieczka 

Artists: Matt Bradbury, Kevin Chin, Víctor Pérez Corbella, John Gravato, Zach Graves, Nick Ingeneri, Héctor Ortiz, Brad Rigney, WiL Springer, and Daniel Xio

Year: 2010

Players: 1-6

Ages: 13+

Playing Time: 30 Minutes

Retail Price: $24.95

As Space Hulk was quickly priced out of my range upon its re-release in 2009, I was intrigued when I heard of the card game being published by Fantasy Flight.  I just recently decided to finally pick it up and try it for myself (big sale at Borders).

Death Angel is a card game for 1-6 players that pits crack teams of Space Marines against swarms of deadly Genestealers.  You must work your way through the Space Hulk and survive long enough to complete your mission.  If one player survives, everyone wins.

The cards and artwork are excellent as one would expect from FFG.  The rulebook however provided much grinding and gnashing of teeth.  Since the box is roughly 8” x 4”, the rules are in booklet form with a nice small font and 32 pages long.  Overall the game really isn’t difficult, it just took a while to get through all the rules and I didn’t really get the feel for it until I had played a solo game.  After that, I was good to go and proceeded to give this game some good plays.

What I found was a rich thematic game that is intense and difficult.  Setup takes a couple of minutes and the game plays fairly quickly once you have the hang of it.

You begin the game with a number of Space Marines depending upon the number of players.  Each team has two Marines, and a player can control one or more teams.  These are laid out randomly in a straight line formation with half of the Marines facing left and the other half facing right.  At the top of the formation is the  location starting card (Void Lock).  Each game you will travel through 3 or 4 randomly chosen locations on the ship after entering the Void Lock.  These cards list the Terrain cards that are used for that location, the number of Genestealer cards that you will be facing, and sometimes a special instruction or action that occurs there.

The identified number of Genestealer cards are placed face down on each side of the location card, these are called Blip piles, I don’t know why, but that’s what they are called.

The four Terrain cards to be used are placed in the correct Position.  Each Space Marine is considered in a separate Position in the formation, so really positions are rows and the formation is the column.  These Terrain cards are things like doors, a control panel, a dark corner, an artifact, and so on.  These are all things that the Genestealers can pop out of, and some have special abilities that you can activate.

Finally, you choose an event card and pick a number of Genestealers to place face up on different terrain from the blip piles, then discard the event card.

You get 3 action cards for each team of Space Marines, each turn you will choose one of these to use.  After you use one, you can’t use it on the next turn, so it takes a bit of planning.  The cards are either Attack, Support, or Move and Activate.

Each turn, you choose and use an action for each team of Space Marines you control, have the faceup Genestealers attack, and then draw and resolve an event card.  When one of the blip piles is empty you move on to the next location card.  Unfortunately, the face up Genestealers come with you.  By the time you reach the final location, you are usually down to just a couple of Space Marines and lugging around a bunch of Genestealers.

The last location card has instructions as to what your final goal is to win the game. If you manage to complete it before all of the Space Marines are killed, you win!

Most of the games I’ve played have come down to a tense ending. One game in particular it was just me and one player left with one Space Marine each.  We had multiple Genestealers on us, I was assured death and the other player would only survive on a roll of a 5.  We had our only opportunity to win before the Genestealers got their turn, and we needed to roll a 0 or 1 on a six sided die (there is no 6) to activate the control panel and win the game.  I rolled and got the 0, and let out a whoop!  The game isn’t easy, you lose more often than win, but when you do win it is with great satisfaction.

There are other aspects to the game as well.  You can get support tokens that allow you to reroll a missed attack or defense roll.  Some Marines have special abilities that allow them to kill or stun multiple Genestealers.  This is great as you can usually only kill one Genestealer per attack. When the Genestealers attack, you have to roll higher than the number of Genestealers attacking your Space Marine.  So if six are attacking you, you are dead.

This game is an excellent bargain as you can pick it up for less than $20.  There is player elimination though, so some people will end up sitting around waiting for the game to finish.  The nice thing is that the games are fairly quick.  In the end it usually comes down to random die rolls, so there is luck involved.  You may want to avoid it if this isn’t your bag.  Overall, I am enjoying this game a lot, I think it makes a good starter to a game night.