It Came From the Tabletop! - Space Hulk and High Heavens

...

Read more...

Time spent playing Space Hulk is ALWAYS time well spent. Like a lot of the best games and things I love, I find that it's a lot better experienced with my son. Whenever I have a little doubt about it being the best two-player game, I just have to play it, and I remember that no, it's basically perfect.

Great listen, as always. Did either of you play the PC or 3do version of Space Hulk. Almost as brutal as the "real thing"

I’ve probably played just about every digital implementation of Space Hulk. The quality of them is a little all over the place. I’m never happy with how any of them handle the timer and the UI is often clunkier than Terminator armor. The 3DO (which also had a PC port and a PlayStation port, IIRC) is wild but brutal.

The best official Space Hulk video game is Space Hulk Tactics. It adds some interesting card play that I’d like to see make the jump to tabletop (hmmmm...file that one away). But the BEST Space Hulk video games do not have the license. I’m not sure if you can still download it or if it runs on modern Windows OS, but Alien Assault is really good and free. Templar Battleforce is also really good, has a bit more polish and will likely drop its already low price in the next few days once the Steam sale hits. I wish it were on Switch!

You know, I first played Space Hulk like ten years ago, and what struck me the most about it was how there were no hit points. Like, you got hit once and you were gone. Until then I had never considered that to be an option, but it made the whole game feel so high stakes and visceral.

Pacing can be a bit of an issue in tactical games like this (in my experience, which is hardly exhaustive), but that one-hit-kills choice makes the game way punchier, and it also keeps the board uncluttered too.

It really is a great design choice and it’s the overlooked element of Space Hulk’s tension building formula. That these guys are so fragile really drives home these two different sense of urgency on both sides. It’s something sorely missing from Claustrophobia, Space Hulk’s only real competition, made worse by the slippery slope nature of how they handled hit points.

san il defanso wrote: Whenever I have a little doubt about it being the best two-player game, I just have to play it, and I remember that no, it's basically perfect.

Yeah, this is exactly how I felt. Perfect game, and it’s been sitting on the shelf unplayed for far too long. I’m thinking that a winter project of painting the figures would be fun and maybe motivation for getting it on the table more often.

Space Hulk was my first big painting project! You can tell when I switched to the better brushes.

It definitely makes an already appealing game even better to play.