Chaos Marauders! Game Review
I got this cool little game for Christmas (Thanks LordVonTush!). Its a remake of an old Games Workshop game reprinted by Fantasy Flight - who has been doing a great service to these old gems lately. It has been revamped with new art, which is awesome, and scaled down in size so that it fits in the cool little “book shelf” sized boxes, which I’ve become a big fan of. Otherwise, the old rules remain basically untouched, which is a good thing in my opinion - games that throw balance to the in wind as a sacrifice to the gods of good fun are rare these days.
In Chaos Marauders, each player controls a chunk of a single chaos war band heading off to their next merciless raid. Your goal is to prove to the other players that your gang of baddies is worthy of leading the horde, and that means bloody infighting, and general chaos. You do this by completing three “battle lines”. A battle line is basically a series of at least four cards, sandwiched between a standard on one side, and a musician on the other. You want to make these lines as big as possible, because the bigger they are, the more points they are worth at games end, ‘course the bigger they are, the more difficult they are to complete. Once a line is complete, it can march over and attack one of the other players incomplete lines, taking all their good stuff for themselves, and then becomes immune to such attacks. If you manage to have three complete battle lines at the end of your turn, you trigger end game, and points are counted up. Points are awarded for all sorts of things, like being the first to complete three battle lines, having battle lines of a certain size, completing sets of multiple cards, having various special cards on your size, etc. So basically, the goal is to complete your lines as quickly as possible, making them as large as possible, with as many goodies packed in as possible, all the while screwing your opponent’s progress who is trying to do the same!
Like I’ve stated before, I love games with simple rules, and lots of flavour to add spice, and this game is all about spice - chaotic spice. There’s actually two rulebooks included in the game, one for the rules of play, and another that goes over what all the wonderfully weird cards do. You can try all you want to execute a perfect game plan - an opponent may suddenly draw a “Skaven Warp Fire Thrower” and simply burn one of your lines, completed or no, to ash right before your eyes. Perhaps you draw the troll card which wanders through your army gobbling up all you magic artifacts. Maybe a chaos general shows up and takes every third of your cards, or maybe forth, it’s all random depending on how you roll the “Cube of Devastation”. As the name suggests, the game is chaotic as hell, and if you want to win, you have to learn how to deal with it and bounce back from huge losses. Above all, you have to come to terms with the fact that nothing is certain in this game. And that’s the aspect of this game that will drive people to set their copy on fire or love it as I do. If you must have control in your games, play chess. If you want to enjoy a chaotic game which you have very little control over, play Chaos Marauders, or play chess - only in a car going off-road.
Course, this isn’t a game that’s the star of the show on your weekly game night. But when I think about it, none of my favorite games are. But it’s definitely fun, and quick too, which is another thing I like about it - devoting any more time to an exercise in randomness would sort of ruin what makes the randomness fun.
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DEACON
