In Space Hulk: Death Angel, the player commands a team of space marines as they explore a derelict space ship while at every turn they are threatened to be overrun by alien monstrosities known as Genestealers.
Yeah, I'm playing Aliens.
The object of the game is to get to the final Location card and fulfill its win condition or to get to the final Locations card and eliminate all of the Genestealers in the blip piles. If at least one Space Marine survives to do all of that, every player wins. If all of the Space Marines are killed before they can meet the objective, every player loses.
Bits and Bobs
Location Cards: These represent the areas of the ship that the Space Marines will be exploring.
The four icons on the sides indicate what Terrain cards are used and where they are placed. The numbers in the radar picture are how many Genestealer cards go into each blip pile. Each Location card, excluding the Void Lock cards, has location ability that is used, if necessary.
Void Lock Cards: The Void Lock is the first location card the space marines will arrive at and it also shows the set up information for the game.
The red triangle is a Major Spawn and the white triangle is a Minor Spawn. These indicate the number of Genestealer cards that are drawn during the event phase.
Terrain Cards: These are the parts of the ship where the Genestealers will spawn from. Some terrain cards have effects that can be used by the marines.
The icons in the right corner are matched to the icons on the location card to determine terrain placement. The bars in the left corner are used during the Event phase, when an Event card is drawn and Genestealers spawn. Some Terrain cards have special abilities that trigger when a Space Marines uses the Move + Activate action.
Event Cards: Event cards represent what happens to the space marines while exploring the ship.
The Event card has a special ability that must be resolved. The bars at the bottom show where and what type of spawn happens. The last symbol causes a Genestealer swarm to shift positions.
Genestealers: They're going to spawn and kill. That's what they do.
The symbol is used for when Event cards cause Genestealers to shift positions.
Brood Lords: Like normal Genestealers, but tougher. I've never met one but that's probably because I don't play this game very well. Brood Lords are never shuffled into the Blip Piles.
Brood Lords have two symbols for shifting and whenever the player rolls the die, 1 is subtracted from the results.
Space Marines: These are the grunts that will be dying gloriously for the Emperor.
This is both sides of Brother Goriel's card. The arrow on his portrait shows which direction he's facing. The range shows how far away a space marine can attack. Range 0 means the space marine can only attack Genestealers in his row. Range 1 means a row directly adjacent to the space marine plus one row above and below. Range 2 adds an additional row to that.
Action Cards: These represent the actions that the space marines can do during a round.
Support tokens: Sometimes the space marines need a little help. These let them reroll the dice.
The Die: It hates us. It's faces number from 0 - 5 and three of the faces also have a skull symbol. The skull is rolled it means an attack by a space marine was successful.
Game Setup
To start, find the Setup Location card that has the number of players that are participating. It's just me playing, so I grab that Void Lock that says "Setup for 1 player (6 Marines)."
Next, I do the Location Deck Setup: 2 > 3 > 4. I find all the Location cards and seperate them out by number, like so.
Then I randomly draw one card from next deck and place it under the Void Lock card.
Time to select some marines for this suicide glorious mission.
These are your marines. They will most likely die agonizing deaths. But it's for the Emperor, so it's ok.
I've never looked at them closely so I just rolled some dice and these were the marine squads selected.
Brother Deino and Brother Lorenzo
Brother Goriel and Brother Claudio
Chaplain Raziel and Brother Metraen
I then take the six marine character cards and shuffle them up and then deal them below the Void Lock. This represents their marching order. The first three marines drawn are placed facing left and the last three are placed facing right. You can tell which way the marine is facing by the direction the arrow on the character portrait is facing.
Placing Terrain Cards
The marines are now all lined up, ready to do some exploring. Terrain cards represent the nooks and crannies that the Genestealers will emerge from. On the Setup Location card are four icons, two on the left and two on the right. Go through the Terrain deck and pull the cards that match the icons on the Setup card and place them in their proper positions. Here's how.
For the first icon on the left, there's the number 1 and a down arrow. That means this Terrain card is placed to the left of the first marine. Second icon, the card is placed next to the third marine from the top.
For the icons on the right, you start counting from the bottom. So the first icon is placed to the right of the third marine from the bottom, and the second is placed to the second marine from the bottom.
Blip Piles
Almost done, I promise. We need to create the Blip Piles! There are two Blip Piles; one on the left and one on the right. These are where the Genestealers are coming from. The number in the bottom corners of the Setup card tells us how many cards should be in each pile. Easy peasy.
Once this portion of the setup is complete, the board should look like this.
Lastly, shuffle up the event deck (yes, it's a thing I haven't mentioned yet) and draw the top card. Event cards are drawn at the end of every round, but for this turn we ignore any effects in the card text and just spawn Genestealers.
This is the event card I drew. Again, just ignore the card text. It doesn't effect us on our first turn. We're more concerned about the three icons on the bottom.
The first icon shows a major spawn on the matching Terrain card. Major spawns are represented as the spikey triangle. I check the Setup card and see that I need to spawn two Genestealers for a major spawn, so I grab two cards from the left Blip Pile and place them next to the Door Terrain card.
The middle icon show a minor spawn on Ventilation Duct. Again, checking the Setup card show I spawn one Genestealer for minor spawns. One card from the right Blip Pile goes to the Ventilation Duct.
After I spawn the Genestealers, I check the third icon and see if any of the Genestealers have this icon on them. If they did, the Genestealers would change positions. They don't, so I won't worry about this right now.
And this is what the board will look like at the start of the game.
Hey, maybe my next post will be about how the game is actually played.
