If you’re looking for a comparison between FFG’s new version of Horus Heresy and Games Workshops’ original version, here it is: Except for the shared ‘setting’, they are completely different gaming beasties.
The 1993 version was pretty much a straight-up wargame that featured area movement and an odds-based CRT. It had a few wrinkles to it, but any grognard could pick it up and be playing full-bore within 45 minutes or so.
The new Horus Heresy is a bit more complicated than that. The map will be familiar to players of the original — but that’s about it. Game play is based on a mechanism of alternating activations with cards driving everything, including combat resolution.
Combat cards
In general, Horus Heresy does not use any kind of ‘standard’ turn structure. The game’s timing is regulated by an initiative track that stretches across the bottom of the game board. Each player has an initiative token on the track — the token closest to the beginning of the track gives that player ‘initiative’, which allows a single action.
The action concept is pretty basic, with actions carrying variable initiative costs. You can either place a new order (1 initiative) on the strategic map, play an existing order from the strategic map (1 initiative) or play a new order from your hand (between 1-3 initiative). After you play out the order, you move your initiative token an number of spaces down the track equal to the cost of the action.
If your token goes beyond your opponent’s, change of initiative occurs. If your token is the first to enter any of the initiative boxes marked with specific phases (Event Phase, Order Phase, Refresh Phase), then one of those phases occurs. The phase structure repeats 5 times on the initiative track, which essentially gives the game 5 ‘turns’ if somebody doesn’t win before reaching the end of the track.
The rules are 44 pages (a well-illustrated 44 pages, but still 44 pages), so obviously I’m not going to sum up the whole enchilada in a single post. There is some twisty-turny trickiness that nicely rewards advanced planning, usually in the form of placing orders on the strategic map. There is some meta-play with the order cards that centers around when to place new orders on the strategic map, when to ‘bury’ an opponent’s order and whether to play a critical order from your hand (and pay the initiative price) or try to sneak it through a cycle on the strategic map.
Combat can be slippery and surprising, again primarily because of the cards. Battles are triggered in two different ways: Either through the play of an attack order, or as the result of friendly and enemy forces occupying the same area during a change of initiative (called a “coexistence battle”).
Next post I’ll get into it in more detail, but for the active player the combat cards function to deal ‘regular’ damage and to put into play special combat effects. For the ‘passive’ player, the cards are used to block regular damage and (in some cases) to cancel special effects.
The combat strength of the units involved in the combat determine how many combat cards each player draws to their hand for the battle. The current strength of a unit also corresponds to the number of hits it takes in battle before it’s eliminated.
It’s interesting the way combat resolution works with the cards. Battles seem fairly sensitive to small differences in combat strength, especially battles that are what I would classify as “mid-range” — say, 7 vs 5 or 8 vs 6. Having one or two more combat cards than your opponent translates to a lot of potential damage that can’t be blocked in the later iterations of a battle.
