Space Hulk revisited - Terminator Marines and price-creep

I got the original Space Hulk (£20, currently £150+ second hand) when it first came out, along with the expansions Deathwing (currently £100+ second hand) and Genestealer (£140+ second hand) which followed over the next couple of years. I also picked up a copy of the second edition as remaindered stock from The Works for £5 (currently £130+ second hand).  It's probably the game I played most in the late '80s and early '90s, and it's always been a good one to pull out for our Scout games days.  I also have all the various extra rules that were published in White Dwarf, and in the picture below, you can see at least a couple of additional room tiles from White Dwarf that I glued to thick card and cut out.  Back in those days, WD would regularly have extra rules (Pitfall special rules and psychic abilities for Space Hulk both appeared in WD before getting incorporated into the later expansion boxed sets) and often counters/map pieces (often drawn by the original game artist) that you could glue to sturdy card stock and cut out to add to your game.

Space Hulk

There are a couple of Cyclone Terminators and a couple of Grey Knights there, but I couldn't find most of my Terminator marines when I got the game out for the kids to try.  A rummage in the loft while they were getting ready for bed allowed me to find the little box containing them.  They were packed up ready for stripping and repainting.

Terminators

The plastic Terminators from the 2nd edition game were far better than those from the original game.  Proper multi-part poseable models with distinct weapons (though the clip-on flamers for the 1st edition were a neat idea).  These just need gluing and painting, maybe a bit of cleanup on the mould lines.

Plastic Terminators from 2nd edition

My first metal Terminator (bottom, centre) was packaged as a free gift with my copy of Space Hulk in 1989.  He came equipped with a Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield, but it was several months before the rules for these new weapons appeared in either Space Hulk or normal 40K.  Flanking him are 2 Terminators with Lightning Claws to round out my close combat specialists, these are from when they were £2.99 for a blister pack of 2.  The one on the left is the only Terminator I ever completely finished painting. The top row includes a couple of Terminators with Chainfists, bought from the fantastic but long-vanished games shop Games Inc. in Plymouth, which used to split blister packs and boxed sets and sell the individual models. They were lined up in a glass-fronted cabinet under the counter, blu-tacked together so you could choose the individual figures you wanted.  These two were something like £1.35 each, being split from the Terminator Squad boxed set (8 Terminators for £9.99: Captain, Librarian, 2 with Storm Bolter & Power Fist, 2 with Storm Bolter & Chainfist, Assault canon & Powerfist, Heavy flamer & Powerfist).  As you can tell, I'm fairly astounded how much these games/models are going for now!  I see that the new Terminator squad is advertised at £35 for 5, inflation calculator reckons that the original metal Terminators would work out £3.50-4 each at today's prices but current plastic ones are about £7 each!  I have my old "beaky" marines from the original RTB01 boxed set that were £9.99 for 30 marines (inflation calculator says £26 today), but the current offering from GW is £37 for 10 marines.  Yes, today's are more detailed and higher quality, but are they really worth 7 times as much as the earlier ones?  I recall GW stating that they were trying to switch to plastic to reduce costs and make the models "more affordable".  It may have reduced their costs for bulk production, but they still charged the same or more for the models, so it was very rare that and of that saving made it to the end user.  Anyway, enough of my grumbles about GW's current pricing policy and back to the models...

Metal terminators

The bottom row has the most recent additions to my force.  I'd forgotten I even had these, I can't remember when/where I got them.  [Edit: I remembered!  Norfolk Boardgames, Wargames & Colectables in Great Yarmouth - a fantastic shop, selling huge amounts of second hand wargames models, plus a few new bits, and all sorts of paints and other useful items.  Well worth a visit in the East of Norfolk at any time!] There's the original Librarian with Force Axe, an original Terminator body with a newer set of arms (Assault Cannon and Chainfist) and an original Assault Cannon and Powerfist.  Somewhere I have a Terminator Captain, but he remains elusive at present.

Metal terminators

Several of these marines were partly painted by me some 20-30 years ago.  I've disassembled all of them, a few will need a soak in paint stripper, some will need a bit of cleaning/sanding, then I can re-assemble and paint.

I also have 50 Genestealers ready for painting, for those I am planning a black undercoat, white highlight, then painting with blue and purple Army Painter Speedpaints and/or Vallejo Xpress to get them finished quickly.

The Great Rationalisation of '21: Mighty Empires!

Next from the loft we have the Games Workshop big box game Mighty Empires, originally designed as a campaign system for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, but also playable as a game in its own right.  2 of my friends had copies of the game and I was fortunate to be able to acquire both from them for the original purchase price of £25 each.  Mind you, we are talking a quarter of a century ago...

A section of Albrecht Altdorfer's "Battle of Issus"

 

Mighty Empires is unusual in having a box lid decorated with historical art rather than a painting by one of the usual GW cover artists.  The 1529 painting by Albrecht Altdorfer shows Alexander the Great defeating Darius III of Persia in 333BC.

Box 1 - map pieces, dragons etc.

 

The first of my boxes contains the map tiles (I used to spend hours arranging and re-arranging these to create marvellous maps), a tub of dragons, some gold coins I bought to hand out to players as something more tactile than just scribbling down how many "gold crowns" you received in revenue at the end of each campaign turn.  The small tubs contain some of the game counters.  There's also that Kryomek plastic blister pack, but more on that in a moment...

Box 2 - counters, armies, settlements

 

The second box contains all the plastic fortresses, cities and villages that go on the map, also the banners (i.e. troop counters) and lots more counters.  I made a North marker hex that could be added to the map if desired.

Rules and maps.

 

The rules have been hole punched and popped in a binder along with all the extra rules they published in White Dwarf.  There is also a punched pocket containing some old campaign maps.

A map.

I fondly remember the campaigns played against my friend Matthew who lived over the road, we'd set up a map on a coffee table in my room and play over the course of 3 or 4 days, maybe 20 years of actual game time.  After setting up the map and choosing your starting locations, each player had 6 turns (each representing 1 month) to explore the map.  An unexplored tile would need to be scouted before you could move into it, 2D6 would be rolled to determing whether it contained a village, fortress, city, or was barren.  Different tables were used depending upon whether it was a river valley, highlands or plains.  Rolling doubles when scouting meant you'd discovered an independent settlement. After the campaign season, you'd tot up how much revenue in gold crowns you recevived from your various settlements (1 for a village of fortress, 2 for a city, +1 for each ship if you had a port), then spend the revenue on improving settlements (building fortresses or cities, bridges, ships), recruiting troops, buying supplies for them.  Wizards in your realm might also cast some spells.

Another map.

 

We must have managed 4 or 5 big games over a couple of years.  Using 2 sets of the game made the campaigns suitably epic and far-reaching.

Undaed - yay!

 

Now we return to that Kromek packet.  One of the sets of Mighty Empires included several of the add-on sets of metal miniatures produced for the game, including pirate ships, wizards' towers, bridges and the undead.  Ah yes, the undead.  All our games would feature the Necropolis somewhere near the border between our two realms.

Undead army banner.

The skeleton army banners are really nice, lots of detail that rewards the quick ink-wash-and-drybrush method of painting.

Dare you enter the Necropolis?  Of course!

 

The Necropolis is a lovely piece of scenery too, suitably forebidding.  I like the fact that the back has a slightly different design.  Investigating the Necropolis could have all sorts of results, you might find a rich tomb and gain some extra gold crowns, or perhaps some of your army would become terrified and desert.  If you were really unlucky, you'd accidentally disturb the Necromancer who would ride forth with his great undead horde and raze the surrounding area.  Happy days!

Necropolis from the back.

 

Now that I have a 3d printer, I intend to add some extra pieces of scenery in due course, a mine, some temples, perhaps a great wall...

The Great Rationalisation of '21: Epic Battles

I started playing roleplaying and wargames in the late 1980's - the "Golden Age" of Games Workshop to many, the time of WH40K: Rogue Trader first edition, WFB 3rd Edition, WFRP, Realm of Chaos and the Big Box Games.

Yes, the Big Box Games... I had a lot of them: Space Hulk; Mighty Empires; Advanced Heroquest; Space Marine; Adeptus Titanicus.  I'll focus on the latter 2 today.

I started buying White Dwarf magazine with issue 113.  There were regular articles with rules expansions for many of the games in every issue.  Epic started with Adeptus Titanicus, White Dwarf articles added rules for infantry (Space Marines and Imperial Guards) and armoured vehicles, Dreadnoughts, Robots and more.  Space Marine arrived soon after, and White Dwarf ran a competition to win a copy of the game or a £5 voucher off the price, I won a voucher and eagerly rushed to our local independent games shop Truro Micro to nab my copy.

The voucher got me 25% off the £20 price tag for my box of 16 Land Raiders, 32 Rhinos, 320 Marines plus a small cityscape of car and plastic buildings.  A few months later, I added Adeptus Titanicus with its 6 mighty Warlord Titans and some marvellous polystyrene buildings to fight amongst.

My sorting in the loft included checking the current contents of my boxes, I've acquired extra copies of SM and AT over the years and I wasn't sure which boxes were which.  The original boxes contain only part of the games now, the painted vehicles being stored more safely in multi-compartment plastic hobby boxes.

As an aside, the cover of the Space Marine box is the point at which the Dark Angel Space Marines changed from black armour to dark green armour.  Apparently the box lid was supposed to depict the Salamanders chapter but owing to confusion somewhere along the line they ended up with the Dark Angel insignia.  Despite the fact that there was were already multiple colour references to the Dark Angels having black armour (40K Space Marines box, Rogue Trader, 40K Compendium, Space Hulk supplement Deathwing to name a few), the decision was obviously made that the new colour scheme would stick instead.

My original Space Marine box now contains a hugely expanded city comprising 3 complete sets of buildings.  I have a fourth set too, which is in a CityTech box and gets used with BattleTech games instead.  I like the design of these buildings, the Space Marine rulebook detailed all the different building types which added nothing to the game in terms of rules but did let you try your city planning skills (no, the generatorium wouldn't be sited by the residential buildings, but is next to the administratum really the correct place either...?).  The buildings were ideally scaled for infantry and armour battles.  You didn't need huge structures like those in AT, these smaller buildings allowed you to create a more maze-like set of streets with plenty of cover but not so tall that they made it awkward to reach into the gaps to move your models around.

You can see from the cover of Adeptus Titanicus that the original Titans weren't really 1/300 scale, more like 1/900 or 1/1000 (so infantry abotu 2mm tall or smaller). There are teeny tiny marines milling around the feet of those Titans!

The AT box contains an odd assortment.  I have the cover of the Codex Titanicus rules expansion which introduced Orks, Eldar plus a whole load of new vehicles including the Thunderbolt dropship, plus revised rules for Dreadnoughts, Robots and a whole range of support weapons/vehicles (Rapier, Tarantula, Landspeeder etc).  The actual rules from this supplement are elsewhere, they came loose-leaf in the card cover ready for insertion into a ring binder.  Most of the bog box games had a rulebook designed to be cut apart, punched and inserted into a binder to allow expansions to be added. As well as scenery, blast templates, counters and the like, the cardboard parts sheets usually included a long rectangular strip showing the game's name.  It was years before I realised that these were designed to slip into the spine of a ring binder to help identify its contents!

Some of my epic Chaos forced were lurking within the box, a Bloodthirster and some Bloodletters, plus theres a few Chaos Marines and some Squats in there too.

I also have some papercraft scenery and a load of counters from different versions of the game.  That white and yellow counter peeping from underneath is a felt-tip coloured photcopy of a traitor Imperial Guard infantry stand from the White Dwarf infantry rules for Adeptus Titanicus.

Last of all is my Bendicks Victoria Orange chocolates box containing the unit datacards from Space Marine.  Each unit had its own card, for the original game this included Tactical, Assault, Devastator and Support infantry stands plus Land Raiders, Rhinos and Whirlwinds.  There was a full set of each for both the Loyalist and Traitor players.  White Dwarf soon added extra that you could cut out and stick to a cereal packet: Predator, Bike, Rapier, Tarantula, Mole mortar, Thudd gun, Landspeeder. The next release of vehicles changed to a different style and introduced some additional heavy vehicles such as the Falchion and Glaive superheavy tanks (later renamed Shadowsword and Baneblade and then the names were ret-conned back into 30K/40K history as different vehicles), Basilisk (carrying a macro-cannon in this early version) and Manticore (2 x multi-launchers) self-propelled artillery and more.  A third design of datacard followed, revising some of those already created and adding in extra vehicles (Leman Russ, Eldar Tempest heavy grav tank, Ork battle fortress).  They soon realised that having a datacard for every vehicle would make it very difficult to run the game and wisely switched to tables of vehicles instead!

Some of my future posts will look at the other big box games Space Hulk and Mighty Empires. There is also the question of all the vehicles and infantry from those Epic games...