Our Fantasy Flight Games Golden Era: A Personal Retrospective
Let’s begin here: It’s 2011 and I’m picking away at a freelance assignment at the kitchen table, probably a blog post about ERP systems for energy companies. It’s a late summer morning, still cool in the little rented house where I have joined my wife- and stepkids-to-be. The eldest is on the couch. I’m tracking him in my periphery as he works on the online summer catchup math course they made him take.
The morning pivots on one sound: His finishing up the day’s module and snapping his laptop shut. Mine shuts the second after, he’s up and moving to the table, grinning, and I’m working the suction-tight lid off Space Hulk: Death Angel.
We start the ceremony of randomizing which two-Terminator squads we’ll command. We always take it as a good sign if we pull the team that has Brother Claudio in it. We wince if we get the team with Gabriel in it.
Space Hulk: Death Angel - Genestealers everywhere, Claudio doesn’t give a shit, he’s going in
We don’t yet know how to employ warriors like Gabriel; at this point the whole game exists for one foundational thrill, which is using Claudio’s special attack to send him charging, twin power claws humming, directly into a throng of Genestealers. Which he will kill. His signature attack always eliminates three alien swarms, but there’s a one-in-six chance he dies every time he executes the maneuver.
We can feel Claudio’s power weapons moving against the game’s generated fear at the end of his armored mitts. We don’t even know the word “Ameritrash” yet, but we are about to become a Fantasy Flight Games household.
Classic Fantasy Flight Designs: About to Become the Foundation of Our Food Pyramid
That little box came with a catalog. Arkham Horror and Chaos in the Old World arrived next. Over the next six years, so did Citadels, Merchant of Venus, Tannhauser, Fury of Dracula, Wiz-War, Red November, Cosmic Encounter, Game of Thrones, Netrunner, and possibly the deepest I’ve ever fallen in love with anything: Warhammer 40,000 Conquest: The Card Game.
Sometimes these games arrived in the arms of the perfect people, as if we’d planted a beacon to muster them. My future wife was a very sociable, bargoing person who relayed that beacon’s signal to the ideal recipients. All of a sudden we had them out of the bar and at our table every Saturday instead. Which was also a kind of bar, admittedly.
Grotesque, ashen “regular life” cut out the supports from that luminous stage, as it always does: Somebody knocks their girlfriend up, somebody else moves away, and in the span of a few months, the boxes go inert because that shared group investment in grasping their logic and drama is lost. We had cool people and good nights at our table, but never that again.
Our Golden Era limped to a close. Asmodee acquired Fantasy Flight in 2014. My girlfriend and I married in 2015. By 2019 I was playing Warhammer 40,000: Conquest obsessively with a boys’ group I built and my wife and I were about to separate.
In between Space Hulk: Death Angel and Warhammer 40,000: Conquest were a string of Fantasy Flight titles that defined the micro-eras of our perfect group and showed us new mechanics and genres with each play.
Space Hulk: Death Angel
But for now, let’s rewind to the little box that started it all: Space Hulk: Death Angel, which I bought as a joke at the Barnes & Noble on Academy Boulevard for $20. It was about the size of a big paperback. The boy and I bonded over our mutual interest in W:40K lore. How much risk could that be?
Space Hulk: Death Angel Firsts
• First game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe
• First co-op game
• First card-driven tactical combat game
• First Fantasy Flight game
What Are You Supposed to Do in Space Hulk: Death Angel?
Space Hulk: Death Angel pits you — in either solo mode or with up to five pals — against a forlorn and dangerous derelict vessel called the Sin of Damnation. You’re playing as Terminators from the vaunted Blood Angel Space Marine chapter. As the lore goes, this chapter was almost entirely wiped out the first time they boaded the craft, now they’re back to clean it out. You’re going to manage a desperate corner of that effort.
Blood Angels are 8+ feet tall even before putting on the Terminator suits. All but invulnerable to the average threat. Except the Sin of Damnation isn’t an ideal arena; lurking around the craft are swarms of Tyranid Genestealers who are faster, more numerous, and highly cunning.
On an open field, there wouldn't be a story: The ridiculous Blood Angel firepower would turn the xenos to paste in seconds. But this abandoned craft’s many shadowed nooks even the odds as the bulky and slow Terminator suits clomp their way to the objective on the last room card, getting flanked and ambushed at every turn.
Designer Corey Konieczka’s job was to translate the successful larger-format Space Hulk board game into a card-driven battle that delivered the same tension and strategy. Your Marines are represented by a column of cards down the middle. Room features and alien enemy cards appear to your left and right, shifting as you change locations or your foe comes up with a new angle. You’ve got to maneuver and blast your way through a number of ship locations and survive long enough to get to the last card, which drops a final challenge in your lap.
Genestealers spawn on both sides of your column and attack constantly. Bad rolls or bad positioning can get you quickly washed away in a tide of probing, slashing claws. About a third of the time, you’re screwed by the second or third room because you’ve already lost too many of your Battle Brothers.
About another third of the time, you can fight your way through to the ultimate or penultimate room before being engulfed. No win on the table, but you can at least approach the Emperor on the Golden Throne knowing you did your Imperial best.
And then you get the cinematic payoff in another 30% of the games: Hitting that last objective with just enough strength and time to fulfill the last room’s condition. It’s always a thrill: the squadmate who survives three blindside attacks, and in so doing, keeps the whole column from collapsing. Activating a room feature, such as the dramatic option to intentionally detonate a tank of fuel — that blunts the mass of Genestealers just enough to buy you time for an extra maneuver. The furious string of offense rolls that clears out every alien on a whole side of the column, getting you up out of your chair and flexing light a tight end that just caught the game winner in the end zone.
These thrills get richer the more you get inside the nuanced decision space of the game’s action scarcity, which abstracts the chaos of close-in fighting in a cramped, dangerous place: Each of your squads can only play one action per turn: Maneuver, attack, or play a Support action that shores up your fellows’ ability to survive attacks.
And you can’t play the same action for a single squad on successive turns, which is a long way of saying that the juice of this game is realizing that you can’t blast your way out of all your problems and you’ve got to figure out how to make these humorless, clunky, genetically designed fanatics of yours pirouette like ballerinas through a mix of calculated risks, finessed positioning, and some good rolling.
Each squad’s set of three commands also comes with sub-abilities unique to that team. I still take this game out and run it solo several times a year, and I think I’m still getting better at using the unique squad abilities at the right time.
If there’s one thing that’s changed since 2011, when I played this game to excess with my stepson, it’s seeing more power in the gestalt of all the actions rather than banking on good rolls and withering attacks. Which you’ll still need to win, but that minute footwork adds the dimension that rolls it all up into a boffo combination of theme, setting, cinematic evocation, and tense problem-solving.
Some copies of this game are still floating around on the secondary markets; I searched a minute ago and saw a few going for north of $200. So I’ll be holding on to mine, this well-matched sparring partner and its worn cards, which I finally had to sleeve because they were about one molecule thick, and most of that was grime.
The power of its suggested action, the old-baseball-mitt familiarity of it, still surpass the residual melancholy in the box. For the Emperor. For Sanguinius. For the mind that can nudge a servo motor just so in a kind of heaven, whole and complete.
Arkham Horror Second Edition: The Hulking Mess That Summoned the Perfect Monsters
While my stepson and I were playing the hell out of Space Hulk: Death Angel, I was staring holes in the little catalog that came in the Death Angel box. After all that staring, I added Arkham Horror Second Edition to our shelf.
This was an ambitious purchase: This heavy-fisted co-op adventure is not easy to learn and not easy to win as you and your pals — playing characters who find themselves in a 1922 town overrun with creatures from HP Lovecraft’s horror stories — get ground up in its arcane rulebook and cruel machinery.
I figured my stepson would jump in with both feet, but he surprisingly turned his nose up at first. I was bummed. Complained about it to his Mom.
“I’ll play with you,” she said. And not only did she play with me, she invited along four of her local dive bar homies . These people became the mainstay of our group for three years.
Here’s a scene I’ll never forget: Our dining room table was packed and we’d been at it all night. The character I pulled for that session was a nun who must have done something to anger the Christian god she served. If there was a cultist or creature roaming the streets, she’d run across it and lose to it in combat. I barely got anything done the whole game because Sister Mary was constantly laid up at the hospital or sanitarium, recovering from her latest mismatch on the foggy streets of Arkham, Massachusetts.
Losing your sanity or health points also means you have to discard items. The only thing she had left, outside of plenty of time to wonder if she’d banked on the wrong deity, was a very powerful two-handed sword she’d found at one of the game’s locations.
And my friend Gavin’s character wanted that sword. The rules said that characters in the same location could trade items, so there they were over my hospital bed telling me I had to give up the sword so somebody with a better chance could use it.
This was a fascinating psychological case study: Since it’s a co-op game, making a sacrifice for the greater goal had its logic. But I was drunk — we all were — and I didn’t like the way he was badgering me. Sister Mary had no other items and not a dollar to her name. I would essentially be retired from the game, and I wanted to keep playing, so I told him to go pound sand.
I’m pretty sure we lost. But we lost a lot, because attention would sag badly by the third or fourth hour. There’d be more riffing and laughing than there was problem-solving and cooperation. Or immersion.
Arkham Horror tries to sell you pieces of the psychological displacement and invading alien gloom of Lovecraft’s work, but what you’re really doing is a big, messy version of the sci-fi/pulp movie arc: A bunch of Regular Folks from all walks of life find themselves up to their neck in supernatural horror, somehow learn to read spell books written 50,000 centuries ago, and shut the portals before the unnameable engulfs the town, and maybe the world.
There’s a dungeon exploration/RPG-lite aspect to it as you adjust your character’s skill track and stick your nose into Arkham’s seams in search of helpful items, but because of how we played, the team spirit and the attention required to keep the story meshed with group decision-making suffered.
Another memory: Late in another game. I’d just gone to a new location, at which point you’re supposed to draw a card from that location, read the flavor text, and resolve the encounter. And nobody was listening. I was just wandering around the board on my own. It sucked.
The cure for this turned out to be playing 7 Wonders instead when we had six lushes at the table, but that’s not a Fantasy Flight title. But Arkham Horror came with us to our new house in 2012 and my wife-to-be and I figured out a better way to play it: Two players, each controlling two investigators apiece.
The lady and I had some killer Saturday afternoons this way. When you have two characters, you still have options if one falls on hard times; there wasn’t all the drinking and chatter, so we’d think together, move faster, and run better drills, such as assigning the best combat-focused investigators to tamp down trouble on the street while the more mentally gifted players dove through portals in an attempt to close and seal them, which is the best way to win.
If all the open portals hit critical mass, some shambling three-story-tall thing composed of stars, vapor, and malice walks out of one of the portals and you have to fight it. Which the lady and I also pulled off once in a feverish battle with one of the eight Old Gods who can pull up on you. Chucking a bundle of dynamite at a supernatural being when you’re being frozen from the inside out and bleeding from several cuts is a smashing way to finish an afternoon.
That box came down here to Starkville with me six years ago. I tried to play it solo once when everything here was still in boxes and my best piece of furniture was a Wal-Mart card table. I was pretty lit up when I got it out, and by the time I finished setting it up, I was legless. In my mind, I still knew how to play, but I found myself refreshing so many little rules that I made a drunken rant video about how the game’s too hard.
But I keep the box still for its timeless promise, the idea that I could walk in there any time and lose an afternoon in one of the best ways possible. It’s a fantasy in the same way that beating unnameable entities with Northeastern grit and gumption is a fantasy.
My stack of games now numbers in the teens after the 40-game giveaway. My ever playing Arkham Horror again instead of my more recent solo purchases is a longshot. Seeing the people I played it with is even more of a longshot than that.
But you have to permit yourself a few sentimental dreams once in a while, to look out upon the stars and imagine that haunted old galaxy from foreign sections of the sky will still be yours to plumb with the mountains of little cards and the hilarious antagonism of the game’s pressures on its players.
For now, the box stays as part of my Concrete Island collection.
Arkham Horror 2nd Edition Firsts
• First heavy adventure co-op
• First Lovecraft-themed game
• First game we did with six players
• First time I test-ran anything by myself for two days before sitting others down to it
TO BE CONTINUED WITH: Tannhäuser
