23 Nov

Chaos in the Old World

Filed under: Boardgames 3 Responses

Chaos in the Old World (4)_reduced

A board that looks like it’s woven out of skin. Classy.

I may not be enough of a Warhammer fanboy to actually shout, “Blood for the Blood God!” at the gaming table, but I can assure you that this game is so good that it made me want to. Han seemed eager to try out his new game and being somewhat familiar with the Warhammer universe, I was particularly happy to oblige him. This relatively recent release has four players taking on the roles of the four Chaos Gods who are intent on corrupting the Old World, but only one can emerge as the victor.

The Warhammer universe is a pretty depressing place and Chaos in the Old World makes sure you know that. Cultists who worship the Chaos Gods abound, corrupting the land and its people with their foul rituals while horrific demons run around massacring and terrorizing the populace. The entire game is drenched in theme and screams evil, from the design of the board to the detailed plastic figures and the flavor text on the cards.

What drew me into the game apart from the theme is that the four Chaos Gods all have completely different units, cards and rules. There are three ways to win: to be the first Chaos God to get 50 Victory Points, to have the most Victory Points when the Old World is ruined or to be the first to advance your Threat Dial to the very end. Since the Gods are so different from one another, each of them will lean towards a different strategy, making the game very dynamic and giving it plenty of replay potential.

The game has a fixed turn order, so Khorne, the Blood God always acts first. This is followed by Nurgle, the Plaguelord and then by Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways. Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure and Pain is always last. During his turn, each player must either summon a minion to a region on the map or play a Chaos Card from his hand to a region. This usually costs Power Points but many Chaos Cards have zero cost, so playing them only uses an action. The four players keep taking turns to do this as long as they have minions or cards to play and the Power Points to pay for them.

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Demons, complete with fangs, claws, slithering tongues and more.

Since this is an area control game rather than a wargame, some of the Gods don’t have much use for combat at all. The cheapest minion is the cultist who usually can’t even attack. However, for every one of them that a God has in a region at the end of a round, the God lays down a corruption token. In addition, each minion figure plus the total cost of the Chaos Cards that each player lays down on a region contributes to his dominance value. Provided that this exceeds the value printed on the board for that region and is more than that of all other players, the player earns the regional value as Victory Points at the end of the round.

So what do the corruption tokens do? First off, when a region gets twelve of these tokens from all the Gods combined, it becomes ruined. This gives all of the Gods who contributed to ruining it bonus points plus a big points reward to the God who has the most tokens there and a smaller one to the God with the second most tokens. Ruined regions however are no longer worth any domination points so players must decide whether to slowly milk a region for its points round after round or cash it in for an immediate gain. Since the game ends when five regions are ruined, that needs to be taken into account as well.

Secondly, corruption tokens are linked with the ability of three of the Gods to advance their Threat Dials. For example, whenever Slaanesh puts down at least two corruption tokens in a region with either a Hero or a Noble token, he gets to put a counter to his Threat Dial. At the end of the each round, the God with the most counters on his dial gets to advance it by two steps, while all others with at least one counter gets to advance it by one step each. Khorne is the exception. As the Blood God, he gets to add a counter to his Threat Dial whenever he kills at least one enemy figure in a different region.

Advancing the dials not only puts the Gods closer to the final step which wins the game for the player, but each step also yields concrete rewards such as Victory Points or Upgrade Cards. These upgrades have all sorts of neat effects. One Khorne upgrade gives all of his cultists an attack rating of one instead of zero, which is extremely useful. The design of the dials contribute to the asymmetry between the Gods. Nurgle has the longest dial which makes it harder for his player to win using it. Khorne actually has the second longest dial but because it is easier for him to add counters to his dial by simply picking lots of fights all over the map, using the Threat Dial is his preferred path to victory.

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A look at the whole map in all its terrible glory.

Combat happens at the end of the round after all players are done summoning minions and playing cards. Each figure has an attack rating and a defense rating. For each point of attack rating a player has in a region, he rolls that number of six sided dice with results of 4, 5 and 6 being considered hits. He can then distribute the hits however he wants towards the defense ratings of enemy figures. All combat is considered simultaneous so even though the dice are rolled according to player order, all “killed” figures still stick around to roll their attack dice if they have any. Naturally laying down corruption tokens and calculating domination happens after combat, so killing an enemy’s cultists and other figures will reduce both scores.

Finally, a deck of cards is used as a timer mechanism. One of the Old World cards from this deck is turned over every turn and each has unpredictable effects which help to randomize the game. This could mean adding new Noble tokens onto the map or removing Corruption tokens from certain regions. If this deck is exhausted before any of the victory conditions have been met, then the Old World has effectively won, meaning that its heroes and populace have successfully fought off the baneful influence of Chaos and all the players are considered to have lost.

As the Khorne player in our game, I found myself as the aggressor in just about every battle in the game. Sean, playing Nurgle, wanted only the highly populated regions. Shan, playing Slaanesh, wanted only regions with either Hero or Noble tokens and stuck to one corner of the map for most of the game. As Tzeentch, Han stuck mostly to the edges of the map as well as he only needed Warpstones, but he also used cards to opportunistically teleport his minions elsewhere. Theoretically all of them could get along with each other. This left me scrambling all over the map trying to get into as many fights as possible.

This leads me to believe that while the game can be played with three players, dropping any one of the Gods would dramatically alter the balance of the game, leading to a less than optimal experience. At four players however, I’ve found our session to be nothing short of sublime. Early in the game, I spread my Bloodletters around the map to maximize my chances of getting into a fight but was stumped when both Shan and Han played Chaos Cards that prevented combat from taking place.

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Slaanesh’s reference card and minions. Slaanesh seems to have fewer minions than anyone else, but they’re really hard to kill!

Since Khorne always goes first, I get first dibs at summoning minions and more importantly playing Chaos Cards, which is significant because each region only has slots for two cards. At the same time this was a disadvantage as the other Gods waited to see where I would put down my combat minions and stayed away from those areas. Tzeentch was particularly strong at playing zero cost cards turn after turn to avoid committing his minions to any region too early. Han could keep this up because if he had a hand of less than five cards, he could always draw back up to five at the beginning of every round.

Our game ended extremely closely. In the last round, Shan was just one point short of winning, but both Han and myself were also only one step away from winning based on the Threat Dials. Sean wasn’t as close to winning as I think he tried early to turn his Threat Dial and only later switched to getting points but he could easily help or impede any other player. This means the game has a strong kingmaker element which many people dislike, but I think it fits the evil, backstabbing nature of the source material perfectly.

I risk sounding foolish by laying judgment on the game after just one session, but I’ve found the game’s rules to be the most elegant of any Fantasy Flight game I’ve played so far. It feels like a very satisfying blend of Eurogame-style mechanics with Ameritrash-style theme (even though Warhammer is of course a British property). I’m not convinced that the balance is quite perfect. The tokens that Slaanesh and Tzeentch need, for example, are not only randomly placed at the beginning of the game but with the right upgrade cards, can be moved around the map. Nurgle however needs high population regions that are printed right on centrally located regions on the map, which seems a tad unfair for him.

Overall, this is a game that has strongly impressed me from just one session. It’s one major fault, if it can be called that, is that it requires exactly four players, no more and no less, to shine. Plus some players will dislike the fact that it’s possible to really screw over another player in the game, even if you don’t gain a real advantage out of doing so, further reducing the pool of available players. If you do manage to get together the right number of like-minded folks who dig being demonic Gods dancing on the graveyard of a decaying world, I’d bet there’s no better game out there.

Written on November 23 2009 and is filed under Boardgames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Chaos in the Old World”

Han

I think this game actually has less kingmaking problem, by providing a winning condition for the Old World, it means players unable to win no longer have to sit around or decide who win but should work together to make sure everyone lose.

wankongyew

That’s a good point. I think more than one player will need to be working towards an Old World win though. If it’s just one, it would just be kingmaking probably.

Andrea

Another game board that we must have. I am sure my kids would really love this, as much as they loved your Formula D.

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