Angels of Death don't deliver the end as well as Genestealers

Played a game of Space Hulk: Death Angel today.

It's a card game that depicts the desperate struggle of Blood Angels space marines in a space ship infested with alien lifeforms known as Genestealers.

We had four players and we picked the flamethrower team, librarian (with the clever brother Scipio!), lightning claws and battle cannon.

Game play was pretty awesome. Of course I can't know if every game has as many turning points and close calls but first impression the game gave me was good.

Story of Brother Scipio was hilarious. Background story tells how he is clever and survives by staying one step ahead of genestealers. All he did in the game, however, was pushing the open/close button of the door zone.

Game went quite well for a long time until just in one round something like three space marines died. I was playing the librarian team and lost every member of my team too but event card showed off it was merely a flesh wound.

Flamethrower and battle cannon saved a lot of situations and I can't remember all the situations where we had to optimize every possible special powers just to survive and at how many points we had to resort just to a lucky roll.

But once we lost a few space marines too much things went pretty desperate (just as it should be). We lost all but two terminators, the Librarian who was carrying Artefact and battle cannon marine, when we entered the last room with the win condition for the game. It appeared that we were in some sort of launching room... I'm not sure if there was some kind of nuclear detonation or an escape pod to be launched there but it was nothing short of epic the situation there.

First the battle cannon guy moves to the control panel and slams down his fist on the launch button, trying to roll 0 on dice (the dice had numbers from 0 to 5, by the way) but it just doesn't work. Librarian pushes the battle cannon terminator asides and hits the launch button repeatedly yet still nothing happens. Approaching genestealers rip battle cannon carrying space marine to pieces and the librarian survives only because of the artefact he's carrying.

Then next round librarian cannot use "move + action" card because he had used it last turn. But he had the support card left and it happened so that on the other side of the gaming table there were dozens of genestealers and on the other side spawned only one. So those dozens of genestealers would not attack because of special ability of librarian teams support card.

But the one who spawned on the other side of the board... Librarian needed to roll at least 2 to get one more chance of pushing the button, needing a roll of 0.

Well, roll was 1. Librarian killed.

Now on the hindsight I should have actually placed a Support Token on the librarian that could have been used for a re-roll! How sad, kinda... because though it's awesome when the bad guys win it's still even more awesome when team wins in odds like this.

Anyway. Genestealers won. The only surviving space marine terminator was Brother Scipio, who was left pushing the door closed and open in some earlier part of the spaceship. Even genestealers ignored him because they didn't detect any kind of form of life from him.