From looking at the box of Space Hulk: Death Angel; The Card Game you might think that someone took a junior high school boy’s notebook and turned it into a card game. The space marines in the game have gigantic, over-sized armor and wield things like a crackling power sword, lightning claws, and giant miniguns. This, along with the cheesy title, kept me away from Death Angel.

Yet, as much I tried to ignore the game, I kept coming across reviews saying what a surprisingly great game it was. The first printing of the game has gotten hard to find, and already a reprint is scheduled. Let’s take a look and see if the game is worth the money or if you’ll want to crush it under your power fist.

Thematically, the game is about a team of space marines that get sent aboard an abandoned space ship floating derelict out in space. You get on the ship via a boarding torpedo and will have to go through a certain number of location cards to complete your objective.

Death Angel is a cooperative card game in which each player controls two marines in the line of marines moving through the ship. To the left and right of the column of marines, different terrain cards will be placed where the evil genestealers occupying the ship are most likely to appear. Each marine in the column is facing either left or right so you know whether they’re getting attacked from behind or from the front.

Players have three cards in their hand that they’ll be using the whole game to make their marines do stuff. Attack lets marines attack, Move and Activate lets marines change order and facing, and Support helps marines reroll bad die rolls. No player may choose the same action card twice in a row, so players have to figure out the best time to use each.

One of the cool things about the game is that each pair of marines is different. While everyone has the same three actions, the special text under those actions is different for each color. The orange marines are better at sealing doors to lock out genestealers and one has a gun that can attack three times. Grey has the ability to prevent groups of genestealers from attacking. Yellow has a marine that can make a heroic charge to instantly kill 3 genestealers, but at the risk of that marine being slain.

As genestealers start piling up on locations, they become more dangerous. Each time a mob of genestealers attacks, the defending marine rolls a die numbered 0-5. If he rolls a number less or equal to the number of genestealers in the mob, he dies. Yes, while your armor is so bulky that you have to travel in a single-file line, one hit still does a marine in. Luckily a marine who is facing his attackers can keep spending support tokens to reroll attacks.

Despite complete dislike of the choice to set this game in the Warhammer 40k Universe, we did really have fun with Death Angel. I went in thinking that people might not like it, but everyone had fun. That being said, I want to address a few of the positive and negative parts of the game so that you can assess if this is the sort of game for you.

On the negative side, the theme is bad and the rulebook is poorly ordered, both of which end up being a barrier for entry for many people. Furthermore, you might lose of people because it's possible to be eliminated over the course of the game. No one wants to sit around while everyone else plays a game that they've been taken out of. Yes, you have two marines to run, but most teams have one guy that has a great special power while the other marine is kind of a chump. So sometimes you can lose a lot of your firepower if your key guy dies in the first room of the mission. I wish that one marine would have a power that triggered when attacking while the other would be good while supporting, making it feel like you still had an extra-special way to help the team.

This aside, the game is a very fun game. It's not a great game (few are), but it's a very good game. As far as cooperative games go, it manages to not feeling like a copy of any other co-op game out there. The game has a lot of interesting decisions and if players want to really plan out the tactics of their turns, they can pull of some pretty clever little moves like moving on your turn to push someone into range and into a safer position. Yet, while sometimes having puzzle-like elements, it never feels like a brain-burner. The tactics involved in the game choices make Death Angel a decently fun solo-play game, and I'm not typically one to play board games alone.

Death Angel has a good amount of replayability since the locations you travel to are different every game. I have done a lot of ragging on the theme, but I have to say that I like the idea of leading a squad though a unknown hostile space ship. Furthermore, it adds a lot of difficulty to the game (in a good way) when players don't clear each room before moving on: once a room gets partially clear, the team automatically travels to the next room, bringing all the alien hordes following right behind them.

I recommend Death Angel: The Space Hulk Card Game in general, but I'm not sure the type of person I would I recommend it to. I can say though that I wouldn't recommend it to families, but I think that game groups that looking to play a new sort of co-operative games would like it. Oh, also if you are a junior high school boy who likes the rulebook's picture of the space marine holding the severed alien head, this game has a theme you'll really get into.

Mike Hulsebus is not really sure what the genestealers are going to do with his genes once they steal them but hopes that they are building a human park on their planet. He can be reached at mikehulsebus@gmail.com