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Space Crusade is a board game produced by Milton Bradley in conjunction with Games Workshop and was first made in 1990. While produced in the UK and available in some other countries including Australia and New Zealand, it was never sold in North America. In Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, it is known as Star Quest.
It is a sister game to HeroQuest, which was also produced by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop. HeroQuest enjoyed extended sales with numerous expansion packs in North America; this success in may have contributed to Space Crusade not being sold in North America.
It uses many of the concepts of the Games Workshop's Space Hulk and Warhammer 40,000 games, but at a much simpler level of game play.
Gameplay
The game is designed to be played with 2 to 4 players. One player takes the role of the aliens, controlling all the aliens and monsters on the space hulk, which were a mixture of Chaos, Orks, Genestealers and other aliens from Warhammer 40,000. The alien player takes on a vastly reduced role compared with that of a Game Master in traditional tabletop RPGs, with its sole role being to stop the marine players from accomplishing their missions.
The other players are marine players, and each controls a squad of 5 Space Marines in standard power armour. Each squad is further equipped with order commands as well as equipment cards. Marines can be armed with different weapons; light weapons allow marines to move faster at the cost of reduced firepower.
Close range combat rules are enforced when two units engaging are next to each other. Otherwise, ranged combat rules are followed so long as there is line of sight between the two squares that each unit is occupying.
The squad based system gives each player greater access for strategy and planning. Most of the game is careful calculations of avoiding line of sight, and rushing to attack either from around the corridor, through open doors, or close in with close combat. The mission based system sometimes allows a player to sacrifice units to score points in order to win.
Each game consists of the marine players receiving their primary mission, docking and entering the space hulk (and later dreadnought factories), completing their mission before the other marine players, and returning their team back to the docking claw. Points are scored for units killed and missions completed, deducted for units lost. Players with sufficient points at the end of the game (including the Alien Player) can be promoted to the next rank, which gives them access to additional order or equipments for the subsequent games.
The miniatures included in the box are not of the high standard that gamers normally expect from companies like Games Workshop, but are of much better quality than normally found in boxed board games. The cards are mostly in colour, exceeding the quality of the earlier HeroQuest.
Translations
The German version of the game was published under the name "Star Quest" (at that time, "Hero Quest" was already quite popular in Germany) and has some very interesting explanations and translations for the various effects of the weapons. The aliens are "robots", not living creatures. A player does not kill a robot, the robot is merely removed from this dimension or gets caught by the effects of the weapons and is not harmed at all. Although for example the "Assault Cannon" can quite easily be recognized as a kind of a machine gun, in the german version it is called "Zero Time Gun" and its effect is explained as something like "time bubbles" slowing down the enemy. The game should address to juveniles and their parents.The Finnish translation calls the aliens collectively "clones", but this is given no further explanation.
Expansion games and sequels
Eldar Attack
A boxed expansion set that introduced Eldar with special abilities including psychic powers.This expansion pack allowed one extra player to control the Eldar miniatures, thus allowing the game to be played by 2-5 people.
Of note, one of the alien events allows the player to select a game board and rotate it to any degree. While this has interesting gameplay due to the line of sight required for range attacks, in practice it usually ends up with players knocking over doors and miniatures in the process, leading to many players simply ignoring this particular event.
Mission Dreadnought
A boxed expansion set.This expansion pack gives the marine player access to additional space marine miniatures, boosting the squad to 6 space marines and the commander. Space marines may carry extra heavy weapons or the tarantula mobile turret.
The alien player gains extra heavy dreadnoughts, which are extremely powerful and capable of wiping out an entire squad. The last mission in the additional mission book allows the alien player to continuously construct additional dreadnoughts for more firepower from the dreadnought factory board.
The additional bulkhead doors and corridor tiles allows players to build more interesting board constructions, where as the initial game is quite limited to either the square 2x2 mode or the long 3x1 mode.
White Dwarf
Two articles about Space Crusade were published in White Dwarf: one for using Terminators, Space Marine Scouts, Ork Mobs, Tyranids and Genestealer Hybrids (White Dwarf, 1991), allowing players to use Warhammer 40,000 minatures, and one campaign called 'Renegade' (White Dwarf, 1992).Advanced Space Crusade
Advanced Space Crusade was a modular board game published in 1990 by Games Workshop and Milton Bradley. The premise of the game is that a number of Space Marine scout squads are boarding a Tyranid ship in order to sabotage its delicate internal "organs". The game is superficially similar to Space Hulk in that it uses 28 mm plastic Citadel Miniatures as play pieces, uses modular board pieces to represent the innards of the Hive ship, and has one player controlling the Marines while the other controls waves of Tyranids, but has no greater relationship to Space Crusade than any other game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Without the license from Milton Bradley, Advanced Space Crusade was released in 1993 as Tyranid Attack.Space Crusade Computer Game
Gremlin Graphics Software Ltd. released a computer version of the game in early 1992. It was available on Atari ST, IBM PC, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad and later received an expansion, The Voyage Beyond. It is a faithful conversion of the boardgame, with a board that could be viewed in 2D or 3D views (Barker, 1992).References
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External links
- Description of Space Crusade game
- Space Crusade Resource Site Resources collected by fans to replace lost parts - see download section.
"Space Crusade"