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Assassinorium: Execution Force
- Michael Barnes
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- Mountebank
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Yes, it is expensive and you can buy two other games for this price or whatever (I guess not counting Kickstarter titles) but they won’t likely have figures or graphic design this good. Yes, there is only one scenario but that’s all it really needs rather than scads of extra content that you probably won’t ever get the most out of unless you play this game and only this game for a year. Only one scenario, but it's really good one and the game is more about the gameplay than pretending like it makes a difference if a hallway turns left or right.
The design is extremely lean. Four assassins, each has two abilities and then two different expendables (one has three uses, the other is a one-shot). You do two things on your turn. The enemy (Chaos renegades) is completely automated with a simple patrol/alert/stunned status. They move on a D6 and if they are on patrol, you roll to see which way they go. If they are on alert, they give chase and move directly toward the closest assassin to shoot or melee them. Alerted guys also have an overwatch shot and unalerted guys that hear shots (six spaces or less away) become alerted.
So it starts off as a sneaking mission- yes, like Metal Gear Solid (in fact, this design could EASILY be turned into an MGS game)- to find two specific rooms to stop the Chaos Lord from finishing a ritual. You’re looking for the control room and the teleportarium (or whatever it’s called). But it tends to wind up with everybody on the run and the patrollers hunting the assassins down. Each one only has two wounds, and only one has a save as an ability.
On top of all of that, there is big stack of narrative event cards that mix things up. Both games I played went down very different. One went smoothly but then went to shit and some Chaos Marines showed up, I lost all four assassins. The other I won, but just barely. Lost one assassin before the final battle, another to the Chaos Lord, and the last two had one wound each with three Chaos Marines and the Lord about to just murder them.
Suspense, drama, wild swings of luck (you will roll a 1 like 50% of the time on the 2 or better healing action), plenty of fighting, awesome components, spiky bits, takes about 45-60 minutes. Come the fuck on, this game RULES. And it’s really quite unique, I can’t think of any other dudes in a hall game that is stealth-oriented like this.
I got it for $65 shipped on a Ebay “best offer” from a seller (but weirdly, it shipped from GW) but if I had paid $100, I would still be satisfied. Beyond that, the pricing is definitely GW premium. Regardless, _this_ is exactly the kind of game I was playing in the 1980s and 1990s, and I think a lot of the bitching about it stems from younger gamers raised on FFG-style titles and Kickstarters with 50 scenarios and 100 monster types or whatever.
As for the miniatures, I had the whole thing glued together in about an hour and a half. It was pretty easy. I accidentally broke the female assassin’s cables but with tweezers I got them back on. Granted, I didn’t do any kind of gap filling, only basic mold line removal, etc. but they really didn’t seem to need any of that.
So yes, total victory on this one. Don't let the whiners scare you off.
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- Michael Barnes
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- Michael Barnes
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I think you would LOVE this game, Jeff.
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The setting of Lost Patrol does look more to my liking though.
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- Michael Barnes
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I'll definitely get Lost Patrol after playing this. And now I want Calth and Deathwatch too.
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- Space Ghost
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- fastkmeans
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- Michael Barnes
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Black Library Downloads
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Michael Barnes wrote: Yeah, I didn't realize that was what they were doing with these...really quite old fashioned designs. It really is kind of a shame that they are considered "too expensive"...in an era of $500 Kickstarter campaigns.
Not too expensive...FOMO.
GW games are sold at retail out the gate. There's a sense they are easily attainable and if anything prices may eventually come down.
KS trash thrives on the idea that if you don't back now, you'll miss some limited garbage or that prices may even go up. There's a false sense of urgency at play with KS that forces people to open their wallets more than they probably should.
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In the 80s i was playing Candyland and Go Fish though. It wasn't until the early 90s that I found Battlemasters and D&D. And Dragonstrike, complete with its hyper reality video! And then Magic took over everything until I wasted some money on some Eldar in the late 90s. 2006 probably would have been the best year to be a twelve-year-old. Heroscape, come on, what beats that?
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The one scenario complaint is so dumb. Almost every co-op game ever designed in a single damn scenario. I don't see people bitching that Pandemic is the same goal every time or that Defenders of the Realm is always just four general marching towards the main city. I think because the game has the look of a dungeon crawler people expected it to come with a booklet of scenarios? I dunno. I found it completely illogical that most reviewers complained HARD about this.
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