Ye Olde Inn

Hello guys,

After doing a thorough search I've found several Space Crusade topics on this wonderful site but not a dedicated discussion topic. I've taken the liberty of creating one. I hope you don't mind. Well, feel free to discuss the game, ask questions and so on. Of course, I have my own selfish reasons for creating this topic so let me kick it off!

I've got a colleague who has been listening to my stories about playing Heroquest with our group. He wanted to join but disliked the fantasy setting. He's more into Warhammer 40K. So I did a lot of research and found Space Crusade. It's supposed to be Heroquest in space and it should be very easy to play. Well, I beg to differ. We had our first session last night and we needed hours to set everything up and figure it all out. This is primarily due to an extremely poor translation to Dutch. Seriously, I've never encountered such a bad translation. Of course, I could have downloaded the English manuals and cards and do a lot of research, but I didn't want to invest that much time into something which might only be played once. Now that the group has agreed to give it another go, I need to do my homework

The first big issue we had is that the manual stated that the GM should place ALL the blips on the board section once the first marine steps down and scans. When all 3 teams have entered a board section the GM needs to put the remaining blips on the last board section. Each turn the GM is allowed to move whatever blip he wants. Surely this can't be right?

The scanners have a point system for the number of kills you make. However each blip has a certain amount of points. You easily reach the max of what's possible on your scanner making it useless. Also, it's never mentioned, besides using it the first time, that you can scan again?

Thanks in advance!

Infje wrote:It's supposed to be Heroquest in space and it should be very easy to play.

Not really. It's quite different. It's Heroquest in space in the sense that there's very few stats and minimal rules but the game is quite different.

Infje wrote:The first big issue we had is that the manual stated that the GM should place ALL the blips on the board section once the first marine steps down and scans. When all 3 teams have entered a board section the GM needs to put the remaining blips on the last board section. Each turn the GM is allowed to move whatever blip he wants. Surely this can't be right?

Not exactly. When a board is first entered the GM places the blips for that board.

Infje wrote:The scanners have a point system for the number of kills you make. However each blip has a certain amount of points. You easily reach the max of what's possible on your scanner making it useless.

I can't really remember but aren't there two, one with units of ten?

Infje wrote:Also, it's never mentioned, besides using it the first time, that you can scan again?

A board is scanned automatically when it's first entered, there's no choice of when to do it.

Space crusade in my opinion works a lot better as a cpu game and HQ works better as a board game.

The scanner doesn't go high enough, but it's not meant to be the limit. The easy way is just to claim the blips you've killed aliens for and have done.

The GM places the blips available from those he has as desired. That is right. A good Marine player will punish poor placement using heavy weapons.

The blips are placed each time a board section is entered. There is no oppertunity for a further scan after all the boards are done, the Alien player has to depend on reinforcements (if any) if they mess up their placements.

Wow, that's really odd. Perhaps I read it wrong but in the first mission I was allowed to place all the blips but I couldn't use reinforcements. Placing them all and moving them between rounds really caused tremendous down time for my group.

Yea all the blips are available in that mission but you can only place the blips for a board that a marine has stepped on. You could put all the blips on the first board though. I don't think there's a rule to prevent that but a good house rule is to divide them as evenly as possible between the boards.

The mission says what reinforcements (if any) you get.

There are tactics to moving the blips. Like where you leave a row of squares around a lone Gretichin to make him lok like a dreadnought...

The rules in English can be a bit ambiguous too, from memory it's reinforcements that aren't explained very well.

When I was a kid, I (shamefully) dumped Heroquest like a hot turd in favour of Space Crusade and it was all 40K after that

But being an adult now and having acquired copies of both games, I've got to say that Space Crusade isn't half the game that Heroquest is.

For starters the two games hardly compare. It's tempting to call Space Crusade "HeroQuest in space", but it's only superficial.
Where HQ is a more slow paced dungeon crawler where the heroes have the upper hand, SC is much more buzy, using the whole board at the same time, the heroes/marines dying like flies! (It's glorious)
I wouldn't exactly say HQ is "better", but it has the qualities of having more varied quests and facilitating homemade content much better.
The missions in SC are very same'y- the rotation of the boards doesn't matter much, and all the aliens are (almost) always used. Only the Alien players strategy and playstyle really makes an impact.

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You start the game with all the blips + some reinforcements depending on map+level.
The instant a board section is being entered upon by a player you get to place any amount of blips on that board.
It could be some, all or none... This repeats for every board. The exception being the last board. There you must place any remaining blips.

And yes... The alien player may move any blips he desires each round.
This part works better if you aren't an analytic, strategic mastermind at which point it might get boring for everyone.
But if you just quickly move relevant blips without overthinking, you'll be fine. The alien player arguably has an advantage anyways, so going easy on the blip movement is okay.

Finally the score system on the scanner is not for counting kills - for that purpose you just collect corresponding blips for the aliens you kill.
The score is for when your marines die. It measures the minus points you get. Still pretty useless as you can easily see which marines are no longer on the board.

Good advice guys. I'm currently between houses so I won't be able to play for a while but I'll post an update once I have tried these tips. I was also thinking about dropping the original boards and using the modern Space Hulk ones instead

In the only Stephen Baker interview published (2005), the author of Hero Quest, Space Crusade, and Battlemasters had this to say about SC:

Stephen Baker wrote:The game works : it is my favorite of the ones I've invented .