Advanced Space Crusade - Tyranid Hive ship terrain board ( also for 40K)

[Freelancer]

I finally painted up some Imperial Fists to use with the Advanced Space Crusade boards I made a couple of years ago, so as to play out the scenarios from Ian Watson's Space Marine novel from back in the 90s.

[beefcake]

Wow, cool. Colours look great. Love the guys in the walls as well. Those Tyranid warriors are vastly superior to the Advanced Space Crusade / Tyranid Attack game.

[Freelancer]

Yeah, I had the game back in the day. I bought it for the plastic tyranids (the only way I could get Tyranid models). I was always rather fond of them.

[DivisMal]

Wow. Very cool!
Advanced Space Crusade was always one of the games I wanted to have, but never had money for. 
Later, actually much later, I found the rules online, and was really impressed. What a whopper of a game! I think nowadays it’s probably unplayable due to time and space constraints…
The best surrogate I had was the excellent Deathwatch game for the iPad!

Your board looks amazing! There are some rules scattered in White Dwarf, too. My favorite being Space Orks boarding a Hive Ship to rescue their squigs!
„Hey, Deffhead, gimme da flamer. Bogoff stop teasing Deff. Now give me da flamer and help me cook dem bugeyez gits!“

[ithoriel]

I love your "banana marines" 
Just sold my own 28mm Imperial Fists but have kept my Epic versions.
The older I get the worse my hand/eye coordination gets and the worse my eyesight gets, the smaller the figures I am drawn to. Go figure 

[Daeothar]

I finally painted up some Imperial Fists to use with the Advanced Space Crusade boards I made a couple of years ago, so as to play out the scenarios from Ian Watson's Space Marine novel from back in the 90s.

Brilliant work! 

As fate will have it, I'm re-reading (for umpteenth time) Space Marine at this very moment! It may not be all canon anymore, but to me, it's the very best 40K book ever written. A lot of the RT and 2nd ed fluff was based on, and expanded off, Watson's writings (and those include the Draco trilogy of course).

The terrain is awesome, and the marines work a treat. Not quite 'pus coloured with azure chevrons', but great brushwork all the same

The odd and gangly original Tyranid Warriors I've always found charming, silly and scary at the same time, but technically, the new ones are indeed far superior. But the same can be said of the Horus Heresy marines you've used here!

For years now, I've had a squad of 4 scouts and a sergeant in my cabinet of shame (miniatures I started, but abandoned mid-process). They're the Rogue Trader metal ones (not the feral ones, but the more uniform ones), and they're supposed to be the Three trazior brothers, Omar Akbar and sergeant Juron as they would have appeared during their action where they hijacked a Warlord Titan from  a heretical force.  I really should finish them off soonish...

I have both Advanced Space Crusade and Tyranid Attack. Interestingly, both games have the exact same contents, but very different rules. I forgot which one came first, but I do know that back in those days GW (because they didn't have all that many plastic sprues available and they had to recouperate the huge costs for them) used and re-used as many components as possible in a variety of games.

So the games may include the same components (there were different miniatures though), but they play wildly different. Or so I read; I've not yet found anyone willing to sit through a full play of one of these oldies...

[Belligerentparrot]

Advanced Space Crusade came first, Daeothar. Tyranid Attack had more varied minis, too. ASC just had big nids and scouts.

Freelancer - that board and those minis look fantastic!

ASC was the first proper GW product I owned. I got it because I thought it was an expansion for Space Crusade, which was my gateway into the hobby. My 12 yr old self could never, ever figure all the rules out so I've never played it properly. "Advanced" is an understatement, or seemed like it at the time.

I'd have tried a bit harder if the board and minis looked like that though. 

[eilif]

Folks with an interest in Space Crusade may want to see the revision and expansion of the rules done by Sean at Necromundicon.
http://ironhands.com/rcintro.htm#intro
Takes it into the wider 40k universe including Necromunda...

[Daeothar]

Ooh; that's an interesting link alright! Thanks for sharing

[Onebigriver]

ASC was my first GW boxed game. I loved the Tyranids and the exploration system was good, but after a while it just became routine as there were only 3 primary objectives and 3 secondary objectives. My mate got Space Hulk that same Christmas and I ending up buying it from him when he lost interest. I sold ASC, still got Space Hulk.

[Freelancer]

Yeah, the rules for ASC are very "advanced". Heavy focus on close corridor fighting with move stats = action numbers, and enemy models are able to react to every observable action their opponent takes. Too heavy for teenage me (and the reason GW released it again in simplified Tyranid Attack form I suspect), but now quite appealing for old me.

Daeothar, Watson's Pus Yellow and "eye-aching purple" colour scheme was never adopted by any other source (not even the 3 remaining pages of the Space Marine comic adaptation). I think it was passed off as merely Wastson's scatalogical writing style. After considering whether to attempt it as a colour scheme, I decided I wanted my marines to actually look good, so avoided that particular dermal sphincter 

Weirdly the purple came out unexpectedly on the boards I made. After painting and drybrushing them to bring out the details, I mistakenly used a polyurethane varnish to seal it. This reacted with the acrylic paint I used and leached the magenta out. The result is pallid bleached sections on the walls and floor with vivid purple ooze in the corners (and also the face of one of the entrapped marines). After fuming at wasted effort, I decided it was in keeping with the original lurid board colours of ASC. Who is to say the insides of a hive ship don't look like that anyway.

[eilif]

Ooh; that's an interesting link alright! Thanks for sharing

You're very welcome.  If you or anyone else actually plays through those rules I'd love to hear what they're like. 

Necromundicon has been my bible for wargaming terrain, conversions, etc for over 2 decades now, but his "Starcrashers" game -alot of fun with young kids- is the only one I've ever played and it uses a completely different rules engine.