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can’t write “The devil is in the details” when a game is set in some far-flung future where the devil has apparently been replaced by Things Even More Menacing.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.

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.