The original Hulk buster

Once again its been a while. Apologies, but hobby wise its been a bit thin on the ground. Things have been happening, but nothing of note to write about, until now. Readers will remember my recent disappointment at the revamp of the original dungeon crawler Heroquest. Well, all is forgotten as I have moved on to something far superior with guns, Spacequest. Sorry, Space Crusade.

Yes, Space Crusade, just as good, but with guns and a giant stompy robot. People rave about the artwork on the box of Heroquest, but just marvel at that Gigeresque trim around an image of Dolph Lundgren in the whitest of white power armour you have ever seen. It's a perfect example of eighties scifi artwork. Heroquest may have had Conan on its front, but Space Crusade has Red Scorpion.

A work colleague contacted me recently as he knew I had been after a copy and he was looking to sell his on. So, a quick suspicious looking transfer in a pub car park later (mainly due to my postcode being terrible to find on satnav) and I am now for the first time the proud owner of my own copy of this legendary game.

The game involves squads of Space Marines breaking into floating Space Hulks and dealing with the indigenous alien menance currently there. Or if you are the Alien player, defending your home made up of a ragtag mix of different races from invasion from a self important superior master race. 

In the box you get three squads of five marines with interchangeable weapons. The sculpts are pretty good even by todays standards.

Each player also gets this amazingly oversized "scanner" to keep track of their Commanders lives, points and any re-rolls they get on their weapons.

The player that controls the aliens gets this handy control panel to show the dice they need to roll for each creature. It is made vaguely 3D by popping on these plastic things on each end.

The frustrating part was assembling the board. Putting the four upright walls in a cross formation with these tiny pieces of plastic to hold them in place is not easy. 

The Gretchin are almost as tall as the Orks. They are all slightly jumping for some reason, and they are armed with blunderbusses and old fashioned rifles. They are still slightly cooler looking than the 2nd edition 40k plastic Grots though, so that's something.

The Chaos Space Marines are pretty cool too.

The Genestealer models are very familiar. In fact you could drop one of these into the newer Space Hulk box set and you wouldn't know the difference.

Finally there is the Android and the Dreadnought. The Dread comes with three interchangeable weapons, none of which I got to fire in my first game with my son. First game he attacks it in close combat, with Power Fist and Melta bombs and takes all three lives in one go. Now I did think maybe I should try stripping the Dread, but I really don't want to risk damaging the old plastic with any paint stripper, so I might leave as is for now.

Finally as a little bonus, ten of these little guys were included in the box too in a rather fetching light blue. Note the crazy position the Exarch is holding his sword, meaning he can therefore interchange his weapon too. They are part of one of two expansions to the game with a whole set of extra missions.

I never actually owned a copy of this game until now though, but I did however have plenty of experience of this:

Yep that's right, one of the few GW licenced computer games that worked. This and Bloodbowl basically. It works best when they just directly ported the rules into a video game to be honest. Many an hour was spent playing this. In fact, I recently got it up and running again on my computer and it still holds up.

The game plays in an overhead view for taking turns.

Then shows a 3D view for basic mini animations for combat. Then you can see the Dreadnought in all it's primary colour glory.

 

When something dies, you get a lovely little explosion.

The PC game follows the same format as the board game, you can work your way through the same missions. The first mission being kill the Dreadnought. The only difference being for some reason the programmers neglected to read the bit about the Dreadnought can't stop in a doorway. Yep, you can shut a door on the Dread.