Space Crusade V’s SpaceHulk

Posted by MortiS-the-Lost on Nov 10, 2009; 3:32pm
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/Space-Crusade-V-s-SpaceHulk-tp3980383.html

Billiam Babble wrote

In the early Space Crusade games, were the scenarios/missions more like Heroquest, i.e. mapped rooms with pre-planned encounters controlled by a GM?

This is kinda an odd one to answer since the answer is both yes and no … I’ll try and explain…

First of all despite Space Crusade often being described as a Sci-fi version of HeroQuest, the 2 games play very differently.  

The missions in the Space Crusade Mission Book consisted of point collecting missions with objectives like “Kill X number of creature Y” or “Find and destroy the Chaos Dreadnought” each kill/objective being worth a certain number of points. At the end of the game players add up the points they’ve collected, deduct points for casualties and then look it up on chart which tells you how much of a failure to the Empire you are.
Maps were provided of how to layout the board pieces, but the encounters were not ‘pre-mapped’. In Space Crusade encounters are placed at random by the GM scattering ‘Blip Tokens’ face down onto the board, the blips are then turned over in game when a player’s model draws line of sight to them and the model the blip represents is placed on the board. This means that the objective creatures for your mission could turn up anywhere – even in the first room you encounter on the other side of your airlock (I remember one such game were my marines where slaughtered out right after finding a dreadnought in the 2nd room I came to!). Because of this method of placing the encounters, the maps provided in the book made very little difference to the way the missions played (in fact you can play almost any mission on any map).  


 ^ A typical map from the Space Crusade Mission book

Although Space Hulk uses a similar ‘blip based’ mechanic to Space Crusade, SC does not play tactically like SH. This is for a number of reasons, which I’ll try to explain briefly here…
The blips in SC are pre-placed and never moved by the GM apart from if indicated by an event card. Where as in SH the Genestealer player gets to move the blips along corridor, ect and attempt to out manoeuvre the Space Marines. Because of this SC plays kinda like an old computer game with the monsters standing round waiting for the player to arrive.

++Authors Note++
A Since writing this it was pointed out to me by Mezillious that The Space Crusade rule book states on pg15 that the GM may move each blip token up to 5 spaces on each turn. Thus I retract the contrary statements in the above paragraph

Another difference is that blips in SH can represent a group of Genestealers, where as in SC 1 blip = 1 creature. Both games do however include blank/bogus/false reading blips, meaning players can spend turn after turn arranging their marines tactically for a close encounter, only to find an empty corridor.
Also it’s worth noting that the GM in SC (unlike the Tyranid player in SH) doesn’t know what’s on the other side of the blips until the players encounter them. My point here is that in Space Crusade the GM (or Alien Player as the rulebook has it) doesn’t so much control the game as facilitate it. In fact by borrowing a few rules from something like Chainsaw Warrior or the solo-rules from AHQ it is possible to play SC without a GM.  




^ A few Pictures taken on my Birthday (2009) of Me, Big Cat, Mark and Bill playing Space Crusade using board sections from Mark’s 3rd edition SpaceHulk. The Dark Angels, Blood Angels and the Chaos Marine champion were lent to us for the evening by Bill’s Friend Dave, an excellent painter and hobbyist who we are hoping to see joining us here on the forums soon. The Ultramarines were painted by Mark and the unpainted(!) Space Crusade figures are mine.