Betrayal at Calth Rules Review



While this game has been out for a while i have been intending to write a review since release date (pretty much).

However like many other things that I think of and don't get written this draft kept slipping down my drafts. 

With the New Year upon us, I decided it would be better to try and get some of this backlog written, even if it then takes me a little while to actually post it. 

So Betrayal at Calth, a large number of you (like myself) probably bought this game with a view that it gives you a load of models, and the board game it comes with was just a freebie / bonus.

There is nothing wrong this view point... however having played the game through a few times I have to say that I have been amazingly well impressed as to how this plays out! 

So first up.

The Turn Sequence. 

Each Game turn has a Ready / Draw phase where you tidy up any counters and draw any cards that you might require.

A chunk of board games have these phases and they are useful for just making sure you are ready for your subsequent turn.

Unit Activations

In the game itself each Hex is in essence its own miniature unit, and gets to perform unto two actions a turn.

The Actions are:

Advance
Run
Consolidate
Assault
Shoot
Special Action

You can pick any of these actions unless you are in an adjacent Hex to any enemy unit, at which point your actions are reduced to Advance, Assault, Special Actions & Consolidate. 

Each player gets to activate one unit before passing the activation to their opponent, meaning you always get to react to your opponents actions. 

However you can activate the same unit in your following turn (although then of course they have to sit around waiting till the following turn to do stuff).

The Dice
Hurting things with an Assault or Shooting attack is based around rolling a number of dice, either to all the Assault values in a unit for combat or the sum of all the ranged weapons dice.

There are four results on the dice, blank, hit, shield, crit, and when attacking you want the hits and crits, but defending wants the shields. 

You compare the total hits (criets count as a hit too) after removing a number equal to the shields rolled to the models Stamina, this determines if you kill something or not.

Critical results are a benefit you get to use against the target unit, sometimes they add additional dice for you to roll, remove tactical points (basically actions) from the unit, or ignore someones armour value. 

The Missions
The game itself comes with six missions, and there are (so far) two additional missions available via White Dwarf. 

So far I have managed to play through a couple of missions while we getting our heads around the rules,  and all of these have been very exciting and closely fought games. 

We will be posting a video battle report of at least one of the missions (if not all of them) over the next few weeks. 

Overall
Very impressed with this game style and actually think this method of game play could work quite well at bigger force styles.

This is a nice surprise game that only enhances the value of this box set, and for returning players (like myself) it offers amazing value on the mini's plus the inclusion of a very good game.

Comments