Space Hulk

A board game by Games Workshop, in its fourth edition (as of 2019).

In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, space is very much an ocean, complete with ghost ships drifting silently through the void. These ships, known as Space Hulks, are both prized and feared by the Imperium of Mankind: prized, because their ancient holds often contain artifacts of lost technology and relics of the long-forgotten past; and feared, for their dark and twisting corridors often hide unseen threats and lurking horrors. Among the greatest of these horrors are the Genestealers, the vanguard organisms for the Tyranid Hive Fleets. While each Genestealer is an alien killing machine with claws that can shred the toughest of personal armor like it was tissue paper, their true threat lies in their reproductive cycle, which transforms the victim into a willing pawn of the Genestealer as well as turning all their future children into Genestealer hybrids; suffice to say that even a single Genestealer, if left unchecked, can spell the doom of an entire world. Thus it falls to the Space Marines, humanity's greatest warriors, to board any Space Hulk that drifts into an inhabited system and cleanse it with blade, shell, and fire—or die trying.

The game draws heavy influence from the movie Aliens, with a small team of heavily-armed specialists attempting to accomplish their objectives while under attack from endless waves of killer alien bugs. Four editions of the game have been released; the third edition (a limited edition released in 2009) focused on the Blood Angels chapter of Space Marines and their efforts to cleanse the Space Hulk Sin of Damnation.

In 2010, Fantasy Flight Games released a card game remake of it called Death Angel.

Tropes used in Space Hulk include:

• Actually Four Mooks: Genestealers start out as "blip" counters that are actually between one and three individual genestealers.
• Affectionate Parody: Whimsical Tales of the Royally F%#ked
• Armor Is Useless: The Space Marines' huge, bulky, and ridiculously resilient Powered Armor does absolutely diddly squat for them if a Genestealer makes it into melee range.
• The Atoner: Part of the Blood Angels' reason for trying to cleanse the Sin of Damnation is to regain the honor they lost when they spectacularly failed to cleanse another Space Hulk six hundred years ago.
• BFS: Sergeant Lorenzo's power sword, which appears to be approximately six feet long.
• The Captain: Sergeant Lorenzo and Sergeant Gideon. The Blood Angels' actual Captain, Raphael, serves as Mission Control.
• Capture the Flag: A few missions have the Space Marines trying to recover some sort of device or artifact. Played with somewhat in that the Genestealers can't pick up the "flag," and so must resort to killing all the Space Marines.
• Chainsaw Good: Brother Valencio has a chainsaw fist. It's very useful for carving through bulkheads.
• Continuity Nod: The most recent Blood Angels codex has revealed that the original name of Mephiston, the chapter's Chief Librarian and all-around vampiric Badass, was Calistarius. Hmm.... Notably, Calistarius canonically survives the assault on the Sin of Damnation, so they could definitely be the same person.
• Critical Failure: A Space Marine's storm bolter has the potential to jam when fired on Overwatch. Brother Leon's assault cannon doesn't, as it's designed for sustained rapid fire; however, if he fires it for too long (IE, after having to reload it once already), there's a chance it will fail catastrophically and explode.
• Drop the Hammer: Sergeant Gideon carries a massive thunder hammer. Combined with his storm shield, this makes him one of the handful of Space Marine characters able to match a Genestealer in close combat.
• Dungeon Crawling: Essentially a far-future equivalent of such fantasy adventures.
• Escort Mission: There are several missions where only one Space Marine (usually Brother Zael, who carries the heavy flamer) is capable of completing the mission objectives, so the other Marines have to ensure that he survives and makes it to the target. Thankfully, Escort Missions are a lot less difficult when the VIP is a) completely under your control, and b) a Space Marine.
• Gatling Good: Brother Leon's assault cannon, capable of absolutely shredding incoming Genestealers.
• Hold the Line: A few missions involve the Space Marines either surviving or keeping Genestealers out of a specific room for a certain amount of time: either until a specific number of turns have passed, or until the Space Marines have depleted the Genestealers' reserves.
• Honor Before Reason: This is a Space Marine saga, after all.
• Kill It with Fire: Brother Zael's heavy flamer, which is critical for completing certain mission objectives.
• King Mook: The Genestealer Broodlord.
• Luck-Based Mission: Frequently in older editions it could boil down to getting lucky with what was hiding under the Blip counters, especially in the frequently hideously difficult missions where the Marines had to shut bulkhead doors right in front of the board's spawn points.
• More Dakka: A Marine on Overwatch can fire any time a Genestealer moves or performs an action in his line of sight, which can add up to dozens of times a turn if he's guarding a critical choke point. The drawback to this is that such rapid fire can cause his weapon to jam.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Everyone, for simplicity's sake, though some characters have ways of making that one hit point harder to remove.
• Powered Armor: The Space Marines' Tactical Dreadnought Armor (for all the good it does them).
• Power Fist: The majority of the Space Marines are armed with these. Unfortunately for them, a huge, cumbersome armored gauntlet capable of punching a hole in a tank really isn't the best weapon for swatting a fragile, fast-moving space bug that can rip your HELMETED head clean-off your shoulders faster than you can blink.
• Psychic Powers: Lexicanium Calistarius, the Blood Angels' Librarian.
• Psychic Radar: The original edition of Space Hulk had expansion packs which introduced Librarians; Space Marines with Psychic Powers. One of these powers was the handy 'Scan,' which allowed the Terminator player to reveal a blip of his choice, representing the Librarian using his telepathy to detect the presence of Genestealers.
• Random Number God
• Respawning Enemies: Genestealer Blips.
• Schrodingers Cat: Sergeant Lorenzo lives in the novella, but dies in the mission logs found in the Mission Book. The weird part? The mission logs are otherwise excerpts from the novella.
• Sensor Suspense: This is a game mechanic, being heavily inspired by the Alien series. Genestealers initially appear to the Space Marine player only as scanner "blips", each of which can conceal a variable number of the aliens (or possibly none at all). The number is only revealed when within sight of a Marine or when the Genestealer player decides to do so, whichever occurs first.
• Tagline: MAN VERSUS ALIEN IN DEADLY STRUGGLE
• Tear Jerker: The Deathwing Novella included in the First Edition Expansion Rulebook of the same name.
• Timed Mission: First Edition Space Hulk gave the Space Marine player a time limit of two minutes per turn, in an attempt to simulate the stressful and frantic nature of trying to clear out a bug-infested ghost ship; having a surviving Sergeant on the board upped this to three minutes, in addition to his other abilities. Second Edition dropped the mechanic, while Third Edition sort of plays it both ways: the timer is back, but it doesn't directly affect and is not affected by any other game mechanic, so it can easily be dropped if the players agree.
  • Incidentally, because of the timer, "Overwatch" and "On Guard", it's generally accepted that a Space Marine player is going to make most (if not all) of their die rolls in the Genestealer player's turn.
• We Have Reserves: The Blood Angels force on the Sin of Damnation numbers approximately 80 marines. Conservative estimates place the Genestealer population of the Hulk at around forty thousand.
• Zerg Rush: The Genestealers' primary tactic.