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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.

When Fantasy Flight Games decides to give a game their big box o’plastic stuff treatment, they don’t screw around. The brand-new remake of “Horus Heresy” just landed here in the Swamp (with a hefty ‘thunk’), and I’ll say right off the top that this is the biggest pile of plastic bits and cardboard chunks in one box that I’ve seen since… well, since Fantasy Flight published Tide of Iron a few years ago.

Sometimes, e-commerce is a wonderful thing to behold. Thanks to the folks at Coolstuff Inc., my pre-order of the game somehow managed to arrive on the same day as the ‘official’ product launch by FFG. I don’t think I’ve ever had that happen before. Impressive commercial coordination.

So. Here it is. A large box packed with gaming good and evil from the 31st milennia. For those of you keeping score at home, the box is indeed the same size as a Tide of Iron box.

Big box o' stuff.

Newsflash: There are NO dice in the box. That’s primarily because the game doesn’t use dice. Combat is resolved using an interesting little card-driven mechanism (which I’ll discuss more in a later post). The cards, though, are very nice.

Upon de-boxing the beast, the first thing that I noticed is that the generously-sized, mounted playing board has holes in it. BIG holes in some places.  The idea here is that some of the larger plastic bits — which represent various fortifications, urban areas and factory complexes — go down on the table first, and then the board slips over them so you get a playing surface with something of a 3-D leitmotif.

There are holes in my damn game board!

Of course, what I ended up doing was plopping the board down onto the table and then slipping the plastic bits underneath and running them around under there until they found the right hole. Like I’m coordinated enough to place the bits down on the table exactly where they’re supposed to go? Pfft. Besides, I suspect a fairly gentle placement technique will extend the longevity of the terrain pieces — they’re made of a fairly light-weight vaccuum-formed plastic. Nice paint jobs, though.

Now if you’ve followed along with my Ansel Adams-class game photography over the years, you’ll have noticed by now that I typically shove my game maps / boards/ whatevers underneath plexiglass sheets in order to keep them clean and flat. I even wedged the mounted board for Incursion under plexi.

Obviously, that’s not happening this time - so I’ll have to be extra careful not to sneeze around the gaming surface. I’ll also have to keep the nearby window closed at night so I don’t end up with a future-Terra battlefield that’s covered in an inch and a half of yellowy-green pine pollen. 

An Imperial Titan Legion game piece on the board.

Next? Plastic bits. “Fahsands of ‘em, sah!” Nothing revolutionary going on with the game pieces; in fact, in a way, they’re a little boring. The Chaos player gets black unit bases and four colors of figures — each color matching one of the four Chaos powers. On the other hand, the Imperial player gets gray. Just gray. Gray everything. Gray bases. Gray figures. Gray. The units representing Space Marine Legions get a little splash of color with a ‘legion designator’ that snaps between the figure and the base, but that’s about it.

In Horus Heresy, the bases are more than just weighty chunks that hold the figures from tipping over. Each base has one or more spikey-projection-y-thingies on the front of it that indicate the combat value of the unit. The base also has a holder of sorts mounted on the back where a damage marker can be placed. A single figure (or a twin-mounted figure) snaps onto the base.

The card decks are sturdy quality and well-printed. They come in a couple of different sizes. The order decks (each player has his own) and the bombardment deck are smaller, half-size cards. The event deck and each player’s combat deck are full-sized cards.

The major dramatis personae (”heroes”) are represented by nicely illustrated cardboard stand-ups. These are the seven “primarchs” (leaders of the Space Marine Legions) plus Warmaster Horus, the Fabricator-General of Terra and the Emperor himself.

The lavishly-illustrated rulebook runs to 44 pages. The Scenario Guide runs to 20 pages, half of which is devoted to a narrative of the Siege of Terra.

This is a BIG package, folks. More details over the next few days as I have time to sort through it all.

Here’s an update for those of you who don’t follow the news from science fiction and space opera wargaming: Very soon (next week or thereabouts) Fantasy Flight Games will be releasing their much-anticipated “Horus Heresy” — a big box o’ plastic bits style wargame based on their Warhammer 40,000 licensing agreement with Games Workshop.

But hang on a minute. Before we go there, let’s climb into the Wayback Machine for a quick trip into the past.

Horus Heresy circa 1993

In 1993, Games Workshop published the original board game version of “Horus Heresy”. It was part of their now-defunct ‘Wargame Series’ product line that included “Battle for Armageddon” and “Doom of the Eldar”. The games shared fairly common systems and common styles of design: Moderately sized, mounted maps; large (one inch?) counters and very bright color palettes.

All three games were set deeply into the story line of the Warhammer 40K universe. “Horus Heresy”, in fact, is set some 10,000 years before the ‘main’ game setting and covers one of the major events of backstory — the Chaos-driven revolt by Warmaster Horus and his Traitor Legions, which leads to the final, epic battle between Horus and the Emperor.

As you can see in the accompanying photos of my slightly aged copy of the original “Horus Heresy”, the graphic design was not restrained in its choice and use of color. I believe the gaming world was then playing 2nd Edition Warhammer 40k, and Games Workshop’s artwork in that era still tended toward the bright and cartoon-y end of the spectrum.

Tucked into my game box is a copy of White Dwarf issue 161, which announced the release of Horus Heresy and included a sort of stand-alone ‘trim and play’ mini-game that carried the Horus Heresy game theme into orbit aboard the Warmaster’s Traitor Battle Barge. The ‘Citadel Miniatures Painting Guide’ in the back of the magazine confirms that bright and cartoon-y was still the 40k players’ version of RP.

Some of the colorful stuff in the box

All of the ‘Wargame Series’ material in those days was designed by Jervis Johnson, one of the driving personalities behind the early success of Games Workshop. His design fingerprints are on Warhammer 40k and on nearly every GW game that ended up under their “Specialist Games” division.  (As a quick note, he’s on my short list of favorite designers. In 2002-2003 I also had the pleasure of corresponding with him as a play-tester for the Epic Armageddon rules set.)

But the Wargame Series days at GW are long gone. The design teams have turned over more than once, 40k is into the Fifth Edition rules set now and GW’s intellectual property holdings are geometrically more vast than they were 17 years ago. Games that didn’t plug directly into the profit mainstream - Epic, Bloodbowl, Necromunda and others - got shovelled into “Specialist Games”. The Wargame Series (and a number of earlier board games) disappeared entirely from the catalog.

The mounted map

I’m happy to see an older (and interesting) design like Horus Heresy end up in the big lump of IP licensed to Fantasy Flight Games.  From what I see in the various previews, it looks like the legendary battle between the Emperor and his traitor Warmaster are getting the “Tide of Iron” treatment from FFG.  There are lots of plastic bits, figures that poke into spikey bases, markers that snap onto the bases, several decks of cards, a big mounted map with 3-D terrain bits and a chunky rule book - and that’s just for starters.

It would be nice if this re-design of Horus Heresy was the forerunner of more remakes of the old Wargame Series titles. I will note that Horus Heresy is the most ‘original’ of the three 40k-based wargames. The other two games — at least to my eyes — are space-opera derivatives of historical battles. Battle for Armageddon clearly strikes me as a situation modelled after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.  Doom of the Eldar strikes me as a situation akin to Rourke’s Drift writ large.

You can read more about the new version of Horus Heresy at the Fantasy Flight Games website. There’s even a PDF of the rules now available for download.

When the Second World War abruptly arrived on the doorstep of the United States’ possessions in the Pacific, the American military was prepared with a strategic plan that outlined how the war would be fought.

Part of the plan called for our forces in the Philippines, under the command of Douglas MacArthur, to act as a breakwater against the Japanese onslaught while the bulk of our Pacific might mobilized and fought its way to their relief. According to the plan, within six months the Japanese fleet would be crippled and the sea lanes to the Philippines would be open, allowing it to become an unsinkable base for the final operations against Japan.

In the Bataan box

In the real world, that plan went into the toilet when the opening Japanese gambit against Pearl Harbor seriously crippled the US Pacific Fleet. The garrison of the Philippines found itself at the end of a severed supply line, with no logical hope of relief in anything that approximated the original six-month time line.

So opens the newest game out of the box here in the Swamp Bunker: “Bataan”, a Vance von Borries design published by Compass Games.  Bataan was originally on offer from GMT Games in their P500, but for reasons I don’t recall the game was withdrawn and moved over to Compass.  When the game first listed on P500 I tagged it, so it wasn’t much of a leap to follow along and order it from the new publisher.

It’s the first game I’ve gotten from Compass Games, and I think they’ve produced a very nice package. While the rulebook itself isn’t printed in color, the box is awash in full-color play aid cards that are covered with charts, tables, the SOP, Events and scenario setup charts. The rulebook contains an extended example of play that could have benefitted from some full-color illustrations — but ‘text only’ play examples are better explainers than no examples at all, so I’m not going to gripe beyond a brief mention.

Bataan countersheet detail

There are two sheets of counters in the box, along with a small sticker sheet to correct some minor counter errata. The color palette and counter artwork are what I’d call ‘wargame regular’; nothing terribly inspiring but attractive enough and certainly functional. I will note, however, that while the ‘units’ themselves are fine and dandy, the game markers are extremely bland. As can be seen in the countersheet detail image some of the markers are, in fact, simply words printed on a white counter. Blech. What’s up with that? Does Compass pay their artists by the counter?

It’s not exactly a federal case, I know, but it does seem it will ‘plain down’ the look of the game when those yawn-ish white markers hit the table on top of what are otherwise nice-looking counters.

Not that I’m agitating for psychedelic marker artwork, mind you. There’s enough of that going on already. The psychedelic stuff they saved for the map.

And the map goes all jungle-y on us

The artwork is always a challenge on maps that include jungle terrain, isn’t it? It becomes even more of a challenge when the jungle mixes in with rough, swamps, mountains, trails, roads and fortifications. And the map for Bataan has all of that and then some. All things considered, I think Compass has done a very creditable job pulling together the Bataan map.

Due to lighting conditions and my own digital incompetence, the detail image doesn’t really do the map justice. The bright green terrain is indeed bright green - which is a bit psychedelic next to everything else - but the hexsides are much more clearly defined than they appear in the photo and it looks like the whole thing works pretty well.

Mind you, I haven’t played the game yet so I don’t know if there are any terrain ‘issues’ or other artwork-wonkiness in actual practice. But after a look at the total package from the 10,000-foot view I’m pretty anxious to get it on the Big Table and get started.

In my last post I ran through the whats-in-the-box basics of Incursion. Now it’s time to get down to the nails and lagbolts in order to answer that most important question: How does the thing play?

For today’s exercise, I’ll be using some examples from the game’s introductory scenario — “Recon”. Essentially, a couple of American APE troopers are trying to get from one side of the game board to the other. Their only obstacle is an unending stream of very pesky Sturmzombies.

The forces available for each of the game’s scenarios are generally customizable. Players are assigned a number of Resource Points (RPs), and they expend those RPs to purchase their forces. The first scenario is a bit limited, though. Each side gets 6 RPs, but the scenario mandates that the Americans must purchase two ‘models’ (ergo, two ‘Grunt APE’ models at a cost of 3 RP each) while the Crazed Maniacs must spend all of their RP purchasing Sturmzombies.

Faced with Reaction Fire, even Zombies want to be someplace else.

For 3 RP the Nazis buy the Sturmzombie ‘card’, which gives them 3 new Sturmzombies EACH turn. So in this scenario, the Bad Guys buy the Zombie card twice and will get 6 fresh undead nightmares to bring into play every turn. That’s a lotta stinky Zombie.

There is no time limit on the scenario, but it seems like it will be in the Grunts’ best interests to hurry up. To win the game, one of them has to survive to get off the map. If both Grunts die, the Zombies win. If at least one escapes, it’s another glorious victory for the troops of the Lucky 7th.

Probably the biggest thing the Americans have working in their favor is the game’s Reaction Fire rule, which allows gun-armed troopers to fire every time a model expends an Action Point in their field of fire. But there’s a catch - in order to use Reaction Fire, a model has to end its turn with NO enemy models currently in its line of sight. Additionally, if a reaction-firing model with a multiple ROF rolls doubles, it loses Reaction Fire mode. So Reaction Fire can be a powerful tool, but it isn’t always easy to end up in the right spot to make use of it.

So. In order to get at least one of their guys off the map alive, the Americans are going to have work to maximize their ability to lay down Reaction Fire. The light machinegun bolted to each of the APE Grunts has ROF (2)  for Reaction Fire, which gives them a pretty good chance of scoring a kill each time they fire on a Fortitude (4) Sturmzombie. In ‘normal’ fire, the Grunts have ROF (3) — but they also have only AP (3), so they’re not exactly sprinting across the board.

The Zombies, on the other hand, have to work at keeping the Grunts out of Reaction Fire mode so they can get in close for Hand-to-Hand combat. They’ve got AP (5), so they can move fast enough. The trick for them is getting some big waves of Zombies going so the Grunts don’t have a chance of ending a turn with nothing gribbly in their line of sight.

It’s a tough proposition — and the congested nature of the subterranean setting cuts both ways. All of the twists, turns, doors and short lines of sight make it easier for the ‘Zeds’ to get closer without getting shot at. But it also makes it easier for the Grunts to get themselves into spots where they can go into Reaction Fire mode.

With nothing in their arsenal to make the Grunts duck and cover, the Zeds have a tough time in the ‘Recon’ scenario. They can circle around, make big Zombie conga lines and try to use doors and corners — but sooner or later they’re going to run into a wall of Reaction Fire. A Grunt who ‘loses’ his Reaction Fire status (by rolling doubles on his shooting) might get himself into trouble, but the Zeds really have to work to put together a perfect storm of threats if they’re going to have a chance at winning.

If the Grunt player remains patient, doesn’t panic and manages his lines of sight he is going to get to do a lot of shooting via Reaction Fire. In a couple playings of ‘Recon’ so far, I haven’t had the Sturmzombies get close to winning.

What do you get when you cross the claustrophobic setting and hardened-armor firepower of a game like Space Hulk with slavering hordes of zombies controlled by the evil will of a Nazi mastermind?

That’s easy. You get the latest game to hit the Big Table — “Incursion”, published by Grindhouse Games.

As I’ve mentioned before, my gaming addiction is not entirely limited to ‘normal’ wargames. Strange settings, bizarre themes and oddball systems are well-represented in my game closet. When a game pits the good guys against two of alt-wargaming’s most despicable villains — crazed Nazi scientists and merciless zombies — how am I supposed to ignore that?

So here it is.

Lots of goodies in the box

Incursion is set in the grim - yet oddly campy - game ‘universe’ first established by Grindhouse in their miniatures rules “Secrets of the Third Reich 1949″. The game’s slice of the story is fairly straightforward: heavily armored, firepower-laden American troopers are trying to crack into the well-defended lair of evil genius Hugo von X, the maniacal Nazi scientiest responsible for creating a host of wonder-weapons and abonimations.  There’s power armor (Armored Personal Exoskeletons in this case), machineguns, flamethrowers, grenades, BFGs, Sturmzombies, evil twins, malevolent mutants, attack-trained werewolves and even a Doomsday Device that needs disabling.

Dudes. That kicks ass. What’s not to like?

For a retail price tag around $50, the box comes packed with a nice array of goodies. There’s a two-sided, mounted game board; four sheets of markers and figure stand-ups printed on impressively heavy stock; a  large stack of cards; a pile of plastic figure-stands; three d6; a molded box insert to hold the bits; a rule/scenario booklet and players’ aid card.

Countersheet detail

The physical production is very good quality.  The only quibble I have worth noting is that the die-cutting of the markers and standups was a bit variable. Obviously, the sheets were struck from the ‘front’ facing of the game pieces. In some cases, the die didn’t strike quite deeply enough, leaving an incomplete cut through the printed surface on the back facing of the sheet. The issue was resolved easily enough by tracing the cuts with a sharp X-acto blade — it was just a little more of a hobby project than I’d expected.

Incursion’s rules are pretty simple, especially for a ’skirmish’ level wargame. The turn sequence is old-school, IGO-UGO with bidding each turn to get the initiative. Your guys/gals/things then expend Action Points to peform actions from a pretty limited menu of options - move, shoot, face, ‘use’ something (switch, door, whatever), stab/poke/whack.

Weapons roll a number of d6 (’Damage Dice’) equal to their rate of fire. If the roll equals or exceed the target’s “Fortitude”, a Damage Point is scored. A ‘model’ that collects DP equal to its damage rating is elminated. Sturmzombies, for example, have a Fortitude of 4 and are eliminated by a single DP. American ‘Grunt APEs” — the game’s star-spangled red-shirts — have Fortitude 6 and take 2 DP to eliminate.

Sturmzombies can only attack hand-to-hand. Most HTH attacks in the game roll just a single Damage Die. Zombies benefit from a sort of ‘gang up’ rule that adds a Damage Die to the attack for each subsequent Zombie attacking the same target in a given turn (i.e. first attacking Sturmzombie rolls 1 DD, second attacking Sturmzombie rolls 2 DD, etc.). Given the confined nature of the game map, it’s a trick to engage with multiple Zombies at once — but it’s enough of an advantage that it certainly seems worth working toward.

There are a few special bits here and there, and the battle cards add some interesting twists and turns to gameplay. I’ll get into some more details about shootin’ and stompin’ with a little battle report when I get a chance.

So far, I think Incursion is a fun, thematic and fairly simple head-knocker of a hybrid board/tabletop wargame.  More to come…