attlefleet Gothic is a spaceship combat game that transplants the foot soldiers of Games Workshop's popular Warhammer 40,000 strategy game into the depths of space.
The game draws from the same history as its sibling, pitting the Empire of Man against a variety of aggressors, including fallen humans worshiping Chaos incarnate, brutish spacefaring Orks and the graceful, highly advanced, elvish Eldar.
The base game comes with eight plastic ships—four Imperial cruisers and four Chaos cruisers. Additional ships for the game's major factions, including battleships, destroyers, frigates and space
stations, are sold separately and are typically cast using metal.
Each ship is described using a handful of statistics detailing damage capacity, number of shields, armor rating and defensive and offensive weaponry. Every ship is worth a certain number of points—more powerful ships are worth more—and before each game, players agree on the points
each side can spend.
Game rounds are broken up into several turns, with one for each player. Turns are further divided into movement, shooting, ordnance and movement phases. Each player runs the complete gamut of phases before play advances. The game can be played on any large flat surface, usually a dining-room table commandeered for an evening. Movement across the playing field is measured in centimeters, using one of two enclosed rulers and—in a nod to inertia—ships must move a certain distance each round
before attempting a turn.
Combat's resolved in myriad ways, most involving six-sided dice to determine whether or not a hit is scored. For lances—tremendous, searing blasts of energy—players simply roll a number of dice equal to the lance's firepower rating. If they roll a 4, 5 or 6, they score a hit. Representing less impressive arrays such as rail guns, light lasers and weapons batteries is more complicated, requiring players to compare the batteries' firepower rating against a chart that tracks the orientation and size of the enemy ship. The chart determines how many dice to roll. A number greater than or equal to the ship's armor rating scores a hit.
Damage done by lances and weapon batteries can be absorbed by shields. Each hit against a shield causes it to overload and collapse, generating a plume of ionized gas that slows ship movement and can even damage vessels whose shields have collapsed.
Ordnance—which incorporates torpedoes and bombers—get to ignore shields, but must brave weapons batteries and fighter defenses in order to move in close enough to do damage. Rounding out the offensive arsenal are boarding actions, which allow players to send troops aboard enemy ships if they're able to bring their vessel up alongside the enemy, or can bring down an enemy's shields and then teleport their marines aboard.
Augmenting weaponry are a half-dozen different "command checks," each of which allows a ship to perform some extraordinary maneuver, such as locking on weapons (which improves a ship's chance to hit, but prevents it from making any turns) or brace for impact, which helps a ship deal with damage.
Battlefleet Gothic was released in the late 1990s, but it's being re-released next month. The new version includes new ships for races such as the Imperials, Chaos and Orks as well as new fleets for the Dark Eldar and Tau.
Old-fashioned—but fun—space combat
The key to appreciating Battlefleet Gothic is understanding that it is a space-combat game based on science-fiction physics, not those of the real world. The game is played in two dimensions, rather than three, which simplifies gameplay tremendously, but may turn off hard science-fiction fans who still complain when they can hear TIE Fighters buzzing the Millenium Falcon.
For players in the proper 2-D mindset, the game's a tremendous amount of fun. The combat evokes the best aspects of cinematic naval battles (think Star Trek II or Return of the Jedi). The game allows players to rip through a enemy's shields and deal the sort of critical hits that villains love to glory in: weapons knocked off line, internal fires burning from deck to deck and captains killed in bridge explosions. Ships in their death throes can be annihilated by explosions so catastrophic that they take other ships with them.
Terrestrial and interstellar phenomena make things even more interesting. Battles fought near planets can include ground-side weapons batteries, while those fought near stars encounter solar flares and radiation bursts. Asteroids and abandoned ships can also litter a battlefield, providing perfect hiding spaces for ambushes. These, coupled with 10 scenarios ranging from surprise raids to blockade
running, take the game beyond mere space-based hack 'n' slash by forcing players to strategize.
As with other GW games, Battlefleet Gothic isn't just about smashing one's enemies into dust. The game actively encourages creativity, offering players advice on painting their ships and novel
ways of producing interstellar phenomena. While it's certainly not necessary to paint the ships, doing so greatly enhances the gameplay.
The game's biggest drawback is its rules. While the game mechanic is easy to learn, mastering it can take several sessions. The core rule book would be greatly enhanced by doubling the number of combat
diagrams. As is, the illustrations cover only the most basic and common interactions, leaving more complicated maneuvers to descriptive text. The text can also be ambiguous, leaving players scratching their heads over more obscure rules, like whether or not a command check is needed to avoid firing at the nearest ship when a player's vessel doesn't even have any weapons that can fire at that ship.
This problem is partially alleviated by online discussion boards on Games Workshop's Web site, as well as a free helpline for players, but it would be nice to have a more comprehensive rule book.
Die-hard Games Workshop players may be slightly turned off by the game's mechanic, which varies from the rules used in Warhammer 40K and its siblings (most notably in the elimination of defensive saves for armor). For less dogmatic players, the change isn't a big deal, and certainly helps to speed up gameplay.
Half my players went into this game expecting not to like it, and came out talking about building fleets of their own and squeezing in sessions between our regular D&D games.
— Ken
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