My
Advanced Space Crusade experience is pretty limited , about three full games in the twenty years that I have owned it, mostly due to the lengthy play time (three full games equating to three full days gaming). I do enjoy it however.
Advanced Space Crusade is a very different game to
Tyranid Attack. All that they share is theme and components: the rules are completely different for both. Like
Advanced Heroquest ,
Advanced Space Crusade was manufactured entirely by GW: the connection with MB only applied to
Space Crusade and
Heroquest as far as I know.
Tyranid Attack is a pretty simple boardgame that can be played through in under two hours. Its simple to play and as a result a little "scripted" but it can be fun if yopu like that sort of thing (or have a pile of 40k miniatures lying around that you dont use any more): its very beer and pretzels.
Advanced Space Crusade takes a whole lot longer than
Tyranid Attack in my experience.
Advanced Space Crusade is a game that will probably take an entire day to play through. There are some cute mechanics (Outer and Inner encounter decks of 6 cards for each flank) to simulate the three pronged attack that the marines are launching on the Hive ship. Chits representing units are assigned to each flank. The Tyranid player can see the Imperial chits but the Imperial player cant see the location of the slowly massing Tyranid forces on their "console".
Assigning forces to each flank is a reasonably important part of the game and gives it a more strategic "feel" than Space Hulk. It conveys the idea of trying to co-ordinate an assault on a big, evil, living ship quite well (even if it is done in a simple fashion), which is quite cool as far as I am concerned.
The actual game then consists of fighting out the various different skirmishes that result from the three pronged assault. The D12 rule system is more complex than
Space Hulk or
Space Crusade. It is roughly about the same complexity level as
Doom: the Boardgame if you are familiar with that. It is the first game that I ever played with a reaction system. It is also the only reaction system that I played that I found that worked (although I am still open minded on reaction systems, I just havent had the right gaming experience with them yet, I hope).
A lot of people dislike the board sections, they are seriously gaudy.
Saturday Night Fever nightclub combined with acid flashback gaudy. I dont mind them that much, they are sorta funny. The cardboard doors look amusingly like green womens private parts, which always causes a schoolboy smirk or two. The carboard objectives in the game are hilarious: there is a huge brain, a heart, lungs etc each of which grant powers to whichever side is in control of them. The most amusing one has to be the giant spaceships, giant bum-hole. If the Imperial player captures that objective he can recieve reinforcements. Presumably quite aromatic ones. Laughs all around in my experience.
Problems with the game include the limited forces supplied in the box (three Space Marine scout squads and six Tyranid warriors). I cant speak for game balance straight out of the box as the three or so times that I have played the game I used the comprehensive rules for the rest of the Space Marine and Tyranid armies (Tactical/Devastator/Assault Marines, Genestealers, Termagants etc) included in the rules. Game balance may well suffer due to the use of all of these "extras", in favour of the Marines I think. The game is pretty much the poster boy for that GW opened ended purchasing strategy, "requiring" lots of expenditure to play more games, which then throws the balance out. On the other hand I would think that playing with only the stuff from the box would be a little too same-y.
Another issue is the game length: a full assault on a ship will take (in my experience at least) more or less a full days gaming. I expect that this lengthy play time can be shortened with familiarity with the game system but as it takes so long it only gets played every few years. Therefore in my experience playtime is roughly equal to one entire Saturday.
One rule that always seems to come up is that grenades are far too good and need to be seriously limited. Once marines get the hang of flinging them down corridors and bouncing them off walls and into Tyranid laps they are way too good. The next time that I play each marine will have a limit of one grenade per scenario (and that may still be too much).
As Onebigriver said, the game is limited in that it is always about an assault on a living ship. I play it irregularly enough that I find that a novelty. I have plenty of games that cover more familiar territory.
Regarding the 40K setting, I dont think that it really has *that* much of a bearing on it. It could just as easily be Colonial Marines versus Xenomorphs or similar. You could very easily play the game using EM4 miniatures for example.
Lastly, if you want to play a faster (and dumber but somewhat entertaining) game using the components you could grab the
Tyranid Attack rules from
www.boardgamegeek.com and play that in the course of an hour or two. You have evrything bar eight or so small encounter cards to play that if you own ASC.
ASC will never be as good a game as
Space Hulk, but I am glad to own my copy and I hope to have more fun with it over the years. It scrathes a specific itch for me pretty well.
Its lustre could fade if I played it weekly or monthly or whatever but I dont and as a result I am looking forward to playing it again soon. Like The MightyFlip, I could easily find a home for your copy if you decide to get rid of it
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April 19, 2024, 06:51:16 AM
October 19, 2010, 07:07:34 AM
