Hulks of Space

This post will be regarding the contents of the Space Hulk box. The only unfortunate thing is that the sand timer busted in transit, as did the power sword on one of the terminators.

The pieces of the board are all heavy duty cardboard type stuff. Very durable and they aren't just going to fall apart, they're a lot heavier than you'd expect, the whole box is heavier than you'd expect for any sort of board game. The colors of the board pieces are all pretty nice and the artwork isn't too shabby either, you can clearly see everything and understand exactly what it is supposed to be. All good things.

The rulebooks are pretty nice as well, I assume the rules will be as easily understood as the rules for 40k are. The pages of the books are on the thick side so they should hold up to frequent flipping and use, which is another good thing.

The models. These sculpts are pretty much the most amazing I've seen for plastic terminators. The genestealers all look suitably alien and though they repeat a few looks in the twenty-two in the box, they all look nasty and all look like they're about ready to tear some stuff up. Two are even bursting up out of metal walkways and others are depicted as crawling on or through the ceilings of archways, its good stuff. The broodlord is the king of the crop though. He is enormous and sits atop a heap of skulls with a terminator helmet clutched in one of his massive claws. As a genestealer objective there is a dead space marine captain on a throne, and that is pretty good looking as well. The genestealers are nasty and awesome looking, enough said. As an interlude before I get into the terminators, all of these models are snap fit and and only come in one or two pieces, and when they go together they all look pretty nice, its very hard to tell that they are snap fit models and the mold lines on them are almost nonexistent. It looks like they went to great lengths to ensure that the mold lines fall on corners or the edges of parchment and such and I have heard that this was the intent of the makers, and they did extremely well with this. Things on the terminator side of the fence are even better than the genestealer side. There are only eleven termies so each one is very characterful model and none of them repeat. Each one has a name in the mission books and they all have plates and parchment pieces for you to put names on them and individualize them. Each of the terminators has little bits of genestealer remains on them and one is crouching to rip up a slab of bulkhead with his powerfist.

Space Hulk cost me a hundred bucks plus tax, no shipping because of Games Workshop's until further notice free shipping. From the cost standpoint Space Hulk is immensely worth it if you play marines, especially Blood Angels. That's the thing, all the awesome character of the models is wings and blood drops, the icons of the Blood Angels and some of their successors. Now, filing could get all of that stuff off and some of the better modellers out there would have a pretty easy time converting this stuff. It presents a bigger problem for noobs like myself, but I think I have a solution. Anyway. There are twenty-two genestealers and a single broodlord on the side of the tyranids. At full price, this amounts to ninety dollars for twenty-four genestealers (they come in packs of eight), and twenty for a broodlord (who looks a lot less awesome than the Space Hulk one). That alone is over a hundred bucks. Granted, the bases are odd and some of them would be really easy to hit based on true line of sight, but that brings it down to maybe eighteen useful models for a regular 40k army, or perhaps even sixteen if you wanted to be picky. Even still, we're at eighty dollars. On the terminator side we're looking at one librarian and eleven regular terminators with various loadouts of weapons. Depending on the model, a terminator librarian goes for seventeen or twenty (roughly) dollars and boxes of five terminators (assault or regular) go for fifty bucks a pop. So that is at least another hundred and twenty dollars of models, ones that may require added effort to fit into your army and may not be able to be used based on what type of terminator unit your using. Looks like nine would be fine as regular terminators, the other two have lightning claws and a thunder hammer/storm shield combo, making them assault terminators. So, for a hundred dollars you get one hundred and eighty dollars of relatively useful models, plus a new game to play. A pretty good deal as far as I'm concerned. I've always wanted to play some Blood Angels and I love the look of tyranids, so the box is made of win for me.