After a number of weeks here on the Big Table, I think it’s about time to wrap up my thoughts on the subject of the new Horus Heresy. It’s not quite time for the game to go back in the box, but at least it’s time for other games to start to get a little bit of face time on my cyberpages here.

All things considered, I’ve found the game very enjoyable. No game is perfect — as I’ve mentioned before — and Horus Heresy has a few pesky flaws, but really not that much to right home about.

In addition to the few items I’ve pointed out in previous posts, I’ve discovered one other minor aggravation. For me, at least, it’s something that does slow down game play a little bit. I’m wondering, would it have killed the presentation of the game if Fantasy Flight had managed to get a NAME somewhere on those stand-up figures of the ten Heroes?

Angron is a bit unhappy after routing off the spaceport.

Perhaps at full size it’s easy to tell all of the heroes apart. But at ‘normal gaming distance’ under ‘normal gaming light’, sometimes I find it a real PITA to figure out just who might be who. Yes, yes: I know there’s a little color-coded section beneath the portrait that matches the color scheme on the little “legion indicators” — but that’s starting to get into squinty-eyed territory for me when I might be 5 or 6 feet away from the little 2-inch images.

It’s a problem that likely evaporates after you’ve played the game 10 times (I’m not that far along), but in the meantime it IS a wrestling match for me. Heroes are generally always accompanied by units (such as Space Marines) that should help identify them, but sometimes I think graphic designers for games need to take a hint from their compadres in web design and follow the simple mantra of usability: Don’t make me think.

At any rate, again, not a gut-buster by any stretch of the imagination. Just another little weed that needs to get whacked out of the garden.

So. I suppose a few hard-won observations about game play would be in order at this point.

When the game is setup for the first time and the players step back to take a look at their opponent’s stockpile, there are usually a few moments when the Imperial player may despair and the Chaos player may allow himself a little chuckle. There are a LOT of Chaos units in that stockpile. Not so much for the Imperial player.

Chaos has to land more guys than this.

But here’s the trick: Those units are all in the Chaos STOCKPILE. They are NOT on the game board. The challenge for the Chaos player is to get as much of that large force into the game as quickly as possible. The slower the buildup, the more chance an aggressive Imperial player has to defeat arriving forces in detail.

Here’s another common-sense tidbit: The earlier Chaos units land, the more actions they can take before the game is over. Yeah, I know that sounds rock simple stupid, but it’s a point that’s easy to overlook. All of those little circles on the Initiative Track can play mind-tricks. The game is deceptively short. There are only five Refresh phases in the game. That means units in the game will be able to activate a maximum of six times in the course of a game.

Most Chaos units will expend one of those activations just to get onto the map. So there is a built-in “delay” of sorts before they can join in all of the shootin’.  Chaos units that don’t land until after the first Refresh are even more limited — they will essentially miss a third of the game before they can do much of anything. Ouch.

The other day in my post about combat, I wrote a little bit about Rout. When a unit retreats out of combat, the area it retreats into is marked with a “Routed Activation” marker. Rout pretty much puts a unit out of the fight for two Refresh phases. Because of their overall numerical advantage, very often Chaos players may want to “fight to the death” when things swing against them in hopes of taking down a few Imperial units as they go.

For the Imperial player, the situation is nearly the exact opposite. Imperial forces don’t receive a lot of reinforcements as the game rolls on, so they can’t afford to get stuck into drawn out, bloody battles. They should rarely attack without a clear advantage in Total Combat Rank — primarily because they need to expend a good number of cards for their “shields” to soak off battle damage. Chaos can afford to burn a few combat steps in nearly every battle; the Imperial forces cannot.

As a caveat, I’ll note that games can run long — especially if either player has a tendency to over-analyze things. Large battles where each side may have 15-18 Combat Cards in hand might take 5 or 10 minutes to play out if somebody decides to engage in too much head-scratching. Ten minutes times lots of battles can add up pretty fast.

That said, I think both the card-based Orders mechanism and the card-based Combat resolution really serve to make Horus Heresy a very interesting and fresh ‘feeling’ wargame.

Plus, the little figures are pretty cool.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are no dice to be found anywhere in Horus Heresy. There is no CRT, no modifiers, no table look-ups. Combat is resolved entirely through card play.

Today I’ll take a closer look at how that works. But first, a few bits of nomenclature:

Combat rank: Each combat unit in Horus Heresy is mounted on a base. The base has a number of ‘points’ on it that indicate the unit’s combat rank. Subtract any damage points indicated by a damage marker to calculate the unit’s current Combat Rank. In combat, you will draw a number of combat cards equal to the total combat rank of your units involved.

Heroes: These are the ‘special characters’ in the game — 5 on each side — who are the larger-than-life figures involved in the titanic struggle. Having a Hero present in a combat allows you to draw 2 of the special “Hero combat cards” to your hand in addition to the number of ‘regular’ cards allowed by your total combat rank.

Damage value: A number found in the upper-left corner of a combat card that indicates the amount of ‘normal’ damage it inflicts in combat.

Shields: Shield symbols are displayed in the left-hand column of most combat cards. They indicate the amount of ‘normal’ damage the card can block. Shields can also be expended to block combat card special effects.

Special effects details

Special effects: Combat cards also display text instructions that indicate possible special effects they may trigger when played by the active player. Special effects may require the presence of specific unit types in the combat before they can be triggered.

On to the nitty-gritty. Combat is played out in a series of “iterations” where players alternate taking the role of Active Player. The number of iterations in a combat is stated on the Order card that initiates the combat. Co-existence battles, which are triggered during change of initiative, last up to 8 iterations.

The Defender in the combat (i.e. the player who did NOT initiate the combat with an Order) decides which player is Active in the first iteratation. This is an important advantage because the number of combat cards that the active player can play is limited to the sequence number of the iteration. In plainer English: In the first iteration the active player can play 1 combat card; in the second iteration the active player can play 2 combat cards. And so on – up to 8 iterations.

In an iteration, the Active player plays a number of cards up to the iteration limit. These cards both deal ‘normal’ damage AND produce special effects (usually). The Passive player may counter by playing cards for their ‘shields’ to either block normal damage or cancel special effects.

The card-play limits and player sequencing mean that before the first combat card hits the table, big decisions are already underway. It’s a straightforward concept, but there’s a lot of that “wheels within wheels” stuff to consider. Do you have 1 or 2 high-damage cards that could deal an early knock-out? Or maybe you’re out-numbered but have a deadly special effect you want to play before scuttling away in a retreat?

There are a huge number of possible variations in most combats — anything with more than 7 or 8 cards per side can get really wild. After the second iteration, large amounts of normal damage can hit the table. Special Effects can also screw up the best-made plans, particularly the effects that cause a portion of the enemy force to rout out of the battle.

Any time after the first iteration of a battle, the active player can elect to retreat from combat rather than lay down combat cards. This is the standard survival technique for vastly out-numered forces. The only problem is that when a force retreats from combat, it’s marked with a Routed Activation marker. Unless some extraordinary circumstance intervenes, routed forces are out of action for a long time.

Units in areas marked Routed can’t be ordered to do anything. They can defend normally, but otherwise they’re of little use until two Referesh phases have passed. On the first Refresh, their routed marker is flipped to Activated. On the second Refresh, the Activated marker is removed and they can be ordered normally.

There are only five Refresh phases in the game, so you can see how this might gum things up a bit. In later stages of the game it’s not uncommon for players to elect to go down swinging rather than Rout their forces out of action for the rest of the game.

Well… that’s catchy. Cheap, maybe, but I certainly can’t write “The devil is in the details” when a game is set in some far-flung future where the devil has apparently been replaced by Things Even More Menacing.

So. Over the past 50 or so years, lack of attention to the fine details has slain many a wargame. I’m not talking egregious omissions here — nothing the scale, say, of leaving out a few rules pages or printing the hexgrid reference numbers in reverse order. I mean just those little things that seem to add up to wreck what otherwise would be an enjoyable game.

It doesn’t seem to me that Horus Heresy has any botched details that could come anywhere close to being game-killers. I’ve read a few bits and pieces of grumpery about the game around teh Intrarwebs, but most of it seems to be a sort of knee-jerk contrariness from people who can’t quite bring themselves to enjoy a game that anybody else might like.

Stacking in forts can be a challenge.

Mind you, I’m not saying the game is perfect. There are several details in the package that fall a peg or two short of “excellent”, but none of it interferes with my enjoyment of the game. Big games can be genuinely difficult productions, even for the largest companies in the business. Still, here in the Swamp we don’t cut anybody slack. So here are some of my additional observations on a few items of interest.

The only thing so far that I’ve found truly aggravating during game play is the limited size of the “3-D” fortifications on the map. With only a few exceptions, most of the areas on the map are large enough to hold a “full load” of pieces (the stacking limit is 6 units in non-fortification areas). Unfortunately, this isn’t so with the molded plastic forts.

The stacking limit is reduced to only 3 units in fortifications, but even 3 pieces won’t fit in most of the forts. As you can see in the photo above, trying to neatly fit 3 combat units, a Hero and a defense laser into a plastic fort is pretty much Mission Impossible. So I end up just sort of jumbling them into the fort like I tossed junk into my closet when I was a kid. It works, but it definitely puts a dent in the esthetics.

Going squinty to read the fine print.

A more moderate challenge for me is reading the print on the smaller cards in the game. Dudes, I’m an old fart. The print on those half-sized Order and Bombardment cards is a real chore to read.

On the positive side, the full-sized cards aren’t nearly as challenging to make out. And all of the cards are very well printed on a top-notch, plastic-coated stock. The production quality of all the cards is excellent; it’s just that those little half-sized suckers can be tough to read at times.

Since they are pretty much the central actors in the game, I suppose I should also offer a brief commentary on the game pieces. Like many Day One recipients of the game I was a little surprised at the smallish size of the pieces. Maybe I was expecting something the scale of Tide of Iron? I don’t know. All things considered, the scaling makes a lot of sense as I look at it now — but I’ll admit that a few weeks back I did have an initial “hmmmmm” moment.

The figures are all molded from a soft plastic that should probably help extend their life cycle. My only real concern is the sculpt of the Imperial Army pieces. These are the pieces that will get their bases swapped around most frequently, but the twin “Imperial Grunt” figures are sculpted with rather narrow feet and ankles. The softer plastic will, I hope, help me avoid yanking one of the little suckers in half. I would really hate to inflict a traumatic amputation on some of my Imperial Guardsmen.

Hold still Sarge, or I'll pull your legs off.

I will note, however, that the ‘pins’ on the figures ALL fit into bases without any problems. I recall taking a conical pin file to a lot of my Tide of Iron bases in order to help the figures snap into place. I had no such problems assembling the pieces for Horus Heresy.

Like I said, minor nits. I’m having a lot of fun with Horus Heresy. Next time I think I’ll try to deliver a comprehensible overview of how combat works.

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.