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.

Brother Claudio Space Marine Terminator Card from the Space Hulk: Death Angel game, flanked by a Battle Brother and surrounded by Tyranid Genestealer cardds. — *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 (For Us)
• 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.

*The Chaplain has 10 swarms on two Marines, but he’s not quitting*

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.

*You better light another six candles, lady*

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

Matt Thrower Shares His First Fantasy Flight Love

Below is an excerpt from Breakup Gaming Society’s far-ranging chat with board game reviewer Matt Thrower. We compared notes on the Fantasy Flight Games titles that first got us hooked, and how that happened.

Fantasy Flight Games (Alternate) History: The Glory of Tannhaüser’s Failed Skirmish Franchise Bid

Space Hulk: Death Angel had the boy and I thinking about ways to play deeper into Warhammer 40,000’s bloody sprawl.

The next logical move felt like getting into the boondoggle of the tabletop miniature version together. Except it didn’t work.

I got him one of the starter sets. He ran a few skirmishes with one of his buddies and then he and I spent a night throwing unpainted Orks and Ultramarines at each other. I loved the idea of joining the ranks of people who got deeply into these battles. But midway through our first match, I realized I just didn’t want to do this. The motion and detail I craved were mediated by a mechanical framework that left me cold on contact.

I started wrongheaded arguments with active players on Reddit about why the system didn’t do what I wanted it to do. One of the mods of a Warhammer subreddit at the time said it best: “Dude, just go play something else.”

So we did.

That something else was Tannhaüser, a five-on-five squad combat game that takes place in 1949. But not our 1949: In this universe, World War 1 turned into an ugly grind that stretched into the 1940s and got an injection of uchronic tech and magic. You’ve got the uniform and weapon aesthetics of WW2, except the Germans are physically manifesting demonic influence and the Union forces tote experimental energy weapons around.

Fantasy Flight did a lot of acquisitions around this time, buying up extant games and lavishing them with reworked rules and insane production upgrades. The character tower portrait on the front of the Tannhauser box immediately signaled the action and its time-displaced setting: WW2 but not quite, a sci-fi comic book gleam wafting off every character portrait, every inch of the box that uses such rich pulp that it feels woven, the tone of the character mats, the rulebook.

This wasn’t Warhammer, but the scope of action and theme were an easy sell. The ruthless demonic relic-hunters of the Kaiser’s elite Obskura Korps and the Union’s 42nd Marine Special Forces have converged on a central European castle. The Krauts want to lock down a cornerstone relic that will help them bend this universe to their will for keeps. The Marines gotta stop ‘em.

The action can take place on the main floor or basement of the castle with a two-sided board. Of the five fighters on each team, three are heroes and two are utility squaddies, each of whom have their own player board and customizable gear. The minis are even painted right out of the box!

It was immediately engrossing in its scale and visual appeal, and while I enjoyed the relief of not having a couple dozen minis to think about, there was still lots of juice and variety: factors like rushing, overwatch, and initiative — with the combinations of characters, gear, and missions — felt like the right balance of interesting crunch and manageable scope and sane cost.

When Ameritrash ruled the table: We busted the spine on the original rulebook flipping back and forth to remember how stuff like grenade bounces work, so the boy reset it in a hard binder. He threw in the misspelling for free.

And as if the designers had read my mind, line of sight and targeting was intimate and slick. The game had a Pathfinder system that used tracks of colored circles from room to room. Share a color with an enemy? You can hit them and vice versa.

The game offered several modes, from deathmatch to king of the hill to story mode, and on top of that a bunch of back-of-the-book scenarios. The rulebook had pictures of minis and characters the base box didn’t even have. Who is Irishka Voronin and why can’t I use her R.U.R. cognitive module? Because she came with a separate Operation Novgorod set, which introduced the Russians under the rule of the Matriarchy.

The resurgent Japanese shogunate also had squads. There were standalone mercenary figures with their own rules and gear. Three Tannhauser novels were commissioned and printed. With the level of production and commitment to material, it felt like Fantasy Flight was going for a franchise here, but I quickly got the sense that not many other people were pushing these characters around a map. It just didn’t catch. The Tannhaüser base set still only clocks a 6.5 on BoardGameGeek.

For a time, it felt like a rowdy secret island that only the kid and I knew about. Was it balanced? I don’t know. Was it good? Could have been. Was I good at it? Absolutely not, but he and I played enough death matches on the castle’s main floor to train me out of my random setup and foolish opening moves.

You see, the Germans have to pile up a staircase to enter the main floor while the Union commandos bust in the front for faster spread and positioning. My stepson was a daredevil on and off the board; while I was enjoying the “toy soldiers” buildup of caravaning in through those stairs, his favorite tactic was to rush his explosives specialist Talia Aponi as far as he could and chuck her TNT at me while my Reich squad was still bunched around those stairs.

In a five on five, parity is huge. After the boy’s loud welcome present, I often started those matches with a fatality or hobbling injuries, ready to be swarmed and polished off by Officer John MacNeal and his crew. I think he crippled me our first three games in a row with this no-nonsense tactic.

But I spent some more time reading about the German kit and made sure that the Obscura Korps commander, the occult-powered but physically frail Hermann Von Heizinger, always brought along his Hermetica Occulta, a magical text that makes Union soldiers win a mental duel with Heizinger before they can enter any path he’s on. They usually didn’t, which gave Heizinger’s team a lot of protection and maneuvering room. I started to close the gap between myself and this aggressive youngster.

Not long after that we had a game where I used Heizinger’s psychic buffer to corner, walk down and eliminate the Union squad one by one with the team’s close-combat specialists. A lot of successful d10s were flying. I had four figures to Zeke’s one: the heavy weapons specialist, Barry.

He backed Barry into a corner and made me come to him, keeping himself alive just long enough with his one med kit. He vaporized my team one by one with his heavy flash gun as they darted in and out, trying to roll the killing blow. The boy even made up a theme song for Barry, which he sang as he merrily downed my team. I lost it that morning. I remember screaming “This is bullshit!” and storming down the hall. I’d forgotten that games chosen by your inner 12-year-old will be processed by that same being.

But the detail and tactical richness of Tannhaüser — especially once I got a couple mercenary figures and the Operation Novgorod set — went largely unexplored. When the kid got his first car his junior year, he became a notional resident of the house and our older pals had gelled around other titles.

I keep the game still. For one, I need to photograph it again. Second, it’s just too beautiful an artifact to let go. I have no hopes of playing it again, but it’s one of the memories that I want to have physical form. Sometimes a game box is an autotelic window into a kingdom all its own, inhabiting the same display case as that perfect song that came up late one night whose perfection and wholeness in the moment would never bear translation.

A game box is memory, but it’s also a an artifact of vague possibility that sustains in a quiet way even if you know all those fighters won’t tangle again. So Tannhaüser travels with me for the next convulsion of my life. It’s still unique among all games I’ve played for providing a pocket universe that was not only a chaotic tactical dojo, but a feed of indelible high-production B-movie action climaxes, with all their pleasantly mediated desperation, electrifying turns, and rib-shaking mishaps.

Tannhaüser Firsts

• First detailed squad skirmish game
• First total adult meltdown because of dice
• First “alternate history” game
• First miniatures game we loved

Next: Chaos in the Old World

Our Fantasy Flight Games Golden Era: A Personal Retrospective

Matt Thrower Shares His First Fantasy Flight Love

Matt Thrower Christens His Copy of Twilight Imperium

Win my giveaway pile of indie tabletop charmers. Details in Episode 110. Listen here.