Space Hulk: Death Angel Review

Picture this: you're marching through the corridors of a derelict piece of space junk. You are a Blood Angel, a vampiric faction of the eight-foot tall, genetically enhanced ubermen known as Space Marines. Your Power Armor carapace fits like a second skin, while in your chest beats a redundant heart (in case the first one gets shot, stabbed or clawed out of your chest cavity), pumping adrenaline and steroids through your brawny body. Your mission is to exterminate the hivelike Genestealers pouring endlessly from the vents and dark corners of this floating ruin.

That's the story behind Space Hulk: Death Angel – The Card Game, a one to six player cooperative card game set in the Warhammer 40k universe. It's also a story of statistics. The game comes with a single, custom-molded red die. Three of its six faces show skulls—good news, meaning you've killed one of the swarming aliens. The other odd thing is that instead of a 6, this die has a 0. Bad news: it means the aliens have killed you.

Actually, any number can kill you in the right circumstances, but 0 is always the face of death. Even with your secondary heart and Power Armor, you get no hit points or health refills. When danger threatens, the odds of annihilation will never be lower than one in six. It's usually higher: when a single Genestealer attacks, a Space Marine will die one time in three. The odds increase as the swarm grows: first 1/2, then 2/3, until eventually, death is inevitable, rerolls be damned.

The fluff text in the rulebook puts it another way: "Estimates: 44% chance of mission success with 86% squad casualties."

Those aren't bad odds for a cooperative game. Nobody likes to win all the time, and a few survivors limping past the finish line sounds like an exciting way to end a game. The best games of Death Angel play out exactly as advertized. Far too many of the games, however, roll a critical miss when shooting for this nail-biting finish, and nothing can ruin a cooperative game like knowing that the outcome (good or bad) is inevitable. Here, the die is often cast before you've left the Void Lock.

The mechanics of the game, how it creates the feel of tactical combat using just a column of cards, are pretty cool, tension aside. Each player controls a Combat Team (sometimes more), each Combat Team consisting of two Blood Angel Space Marines. At the start of the game, all participating Marines are shuffled together and laid out in a single-file marching column, the best the Marines can do with their bulky Power Armor. To the left and right of this column, a few terrain features represent the Space Hulk's architecture and Genestealers spawn points. The goal is to travel to the final location. Emptying either of the two "blip piles" of Genestealers effective clears an exit from the current room; travel happens automatically after that. While there are a few ways to manipulate the blip piles, it's mainly about surviving enough enemy spawns. Once at their destination, the Blood Angels receive one of three mission objectives, like destroying the Genestealer hive or launching an escape vessel.

Every round, each team selects one of their three available actions...except it's really one of two, since you can't reuse an action twice in a row. The most important one, obviously, is Attack, the best defense. Each Marine in the team targets a Genestealer swarm and shoots, with those 50-50 odds I mentioned early. If successful, one Genestealer bites it, the problem being that a swarm often contains three or more of the buggers. The other catch is that you have to be facing the correct side of the column, the Power Armor being too bulky to pivot freely, and the swarm has to be in range, determined by counting the spaces up or down from the attacking Marine.

Therefore, you often need to set up your attack in advance using Move + Activate. This action lets each Marine in the team swap places with an adjacent Battle Brother, flip his facing, and activate special terrain features like doors and control panels, all these steps being optional. Finally, the Support action lets the player place a Support token (allowing rerolls on attack/defense) on any one Marine in the formation.

Once all teams have acted, surviving Genestealers attack, one swarm at a time. Unless you roll above the number of aliens in the swarm, the defending Marine is toast. Then, new Genestealers spawn, the swarms move—potentially flanking the Marines or combining into megaswarms—and other special Event effects take place.

It's not fair. Statistically, the odds are stacked absurdly in the Genestealers' favor...yet the humans act with intelligence (I hope). As additional compensation, each team has a special effect attached to their three actions. The yellow team's Brother Claudio can berserk when Attacking, killing a whole swarm at close range automatically...but then he has to roll the dreaded die, perishing instantly on a 0 (no rerolls allowed). When Supporting, the grey team can trap a swarm in an energy field, preventing them from attacking (or being attacked) that round. And so forth.

With the right combination of teams, you can control the swarms so effectively you avoid any threat of death. If a Marine is KIA, a death spiral sets in: the effectiveness of that team's actions has just been halved, and if a whole team is killed, the whole squad loses an entire action per round. Meanwhile, the surviving Marines close ranks, bringing the Genestealers and spawn points closer together, making the swarms larger and harder to survive.

That death spiral is the game. If no Marines get killed, it's too easy; if a critical mass of Marines dies early on, it is a foregone conclusion. Either extreme is boring as hell. When you reach that final location with 86% squad casualties and 44% chance of success, this is a great, tense co-op; the rest of the time, it's garbage. Are you willing to play those odds?