Space Crusade

With all the hype being about Space Hulk (and rightly so!) I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about Space Crusade and be slightly off topic! Now I've been considering how to paint my shiny new Blood Angels Terminators for Space Hulk and I've decided to paint the Sergeants with the white armour like the Space Crusade Blood Angels commander (above). It contrasts very nicely and makes the important squad members stand out although it's an evil colour to paint in my opinion!
Anyway, all the hype about Space Hulk had me playing Space Crusade more regularly in anticipation and I decided to post a couple of pics. My son and I played the last mission in the Space Crusade campaign. I controlled the Imperial Fists (as is the norm for me).



We started out like so. I took the Suspensors, Bionic Eye and Combi Weapon equipment cards. This meant all my heavy weapons marines could move 6 spaces instead of 4 and my Commander had a Heavy Bolter combi Plasma Gun and his Bionic Eye allowed him to reroll one dice each time he shot. With the Imperial Fists in Space Crusade it pays to play the heavy weapon marine game as they have the best equipment upgrades to allow this. The mission was to kill the TWO enemy Dreadnoughts. It's a very tricky mission as ontop of the full deck of blip tokens the alien player gets to use all the Ork and Gretchin reinforcement tokens and 1 dreadnought reinforcement (this is the second dreadnought for the objective).

Unlike Space Hulk the alien player places as many blip tokens as they wish down in each board quarter the first time a marine steps foot on it. This means you can play quite aggressively from the off but then you have a very short game! The alien player also gets to bring on 6 reinforcement tokens in the appropriate squares each turn. On this mission in particular you get swamped as the marine player. I failed to complete the primary objective sadly but I did manage to kill one of the Dreadnoughts.



This one learnt a lesson. Never walk into an Imperial Fist crossfire! The Dreadnought was wiped out in a hail of shooting after I played the Fire! order card allowing my guys to shoot twice. The Assault Cannon, Missile Launcher and Plasma Gun marines were still alive at this point along with the Commander with his Heavy Bolter/Plasma Gun. Sadly just after this point all of my son's reinforcement tokens ploughed into this board quarter and I was slowly picked off. A process that was sped up by 2 Genestealer cards coming up in a row meaning he got to place a Genestealer next to a marine each time and the Genestealers much like in Space Hulk make short work of Space Marines in close combat!
Anyway, just thought I'd share a little of the Space Crusade fun, especially as a lot of people are discovering the magic of Space Hulk and GW board games in general for the first time now. Seemed appropriate!

Oh and I will one day get around to painting my Space Crusade minis. No holding of breath on that one though!