Space Hulk: Death Angel Card Game

I kept hearing really good things about the Death Angel card game, especially in terms of solitaire play. I finally got around to picking it up and thought I’d share my thoughts after having played roughly 10 games.

I Have Never Won

Yeah, interestingly enough this game is ridiculously difficult. The premise of the game is that a few squads of Space Marines are boarding a derelict Space Hulk which is overrun by genestealers. It’s set in the Warhammer 40k universe, just in case that wasn’t already clear. I’m not entirely sure but I think it is loosely based off the Space Hulk game which I hear is fantastic but is unfortunately out of print.

Anyway, the main goal of the game is to survive against waves of bad guys and keep traveling forward until you reach your final destination. You lay out your Space Marine cards in a long formation line and depending on your current area you place down location cards which mostly act as spawning grounds for genestealers. When the Marines take their turn each squad selects an action such as attack, move + activate, or support. Supporting other Marines will give them support tokens which can be used to re-roll dice. Each action card also has a special ability unique to that squad of Space Marines (Which consists of two marines). I don’t recall the specific names of characters but for example: You might have Brother CoolGuy and Brother SmartSauce in the orange squad and their attack card might have a special ability which lets brother SmartSauce roll multiple dice when attacking, etc. So you kind of have to play favorites since some of the Space Marines are less expendable than others.

The combat for both your guys and the enemy is handled with a single dice. It’s red and the sides are marked 0 – 5 and certain faces also show a skull mark. When attacking you roll for skulls and when defending you roll for a number higher than the amount of genestealers attacking. Things start to quickly ramp up and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the number of bad dudes down and to make matters worse they can be constantly shifting sides and positions every round. This is where positioning becomes very important since each marine has a specific attack range and you are unable to attack enemies that are behind you.

That was just a somewhat brief rundown of the the Death Angel Card Game and what you can expect from it, along with losing quite a bit. The game works very will for solitaire play but you can also play with several additional people. There are also several little expansion sets which can add more card options or different Space Marines to choose from. The slightly larger expansions let you swap out all of the genestealers and instead face Tyranids or use a different faction of Space Marines, which I think might be something like Deathwing or whatever. It’s a pretty inexpensive game compared to all of the board games we’ve talked about in the past, but there’s still loads of fun to be had. The difficulty is pretty high though but that’s how I like it.