Assassinorum: Execution Force - Unboxing & Reviewing GW's New Board Game

Games Workshop recently released a new board game - Assassinorum: Execution Force. It's similar to Space Hulk in style - miniatures on a board rather than a straight up board game and is a "While Stocks Last" item that costs £75 direct. The main draw for most people will be the four new Imperial Assassins, but you also get a Chaos Terminator Lord sprue to allow you to build Trask, The Chaos Sorcerer who is the "Big Bad" if you will, and also 15 snap fit chaos cultists plucked from the Dark Vengeance box set.

So, what exactly is in the box?

1 Rule book, 1 assembly guide

4 pieces of game board (forgot to get pictures of these, so borrowed them from GW). 1 Temple of Shades board and 3 pieces that make up the main board.

8 red dice with a slight marble effect, cards for each miniature type (Sorcerer, Chaos Marines, Cultists, each Assassin) and an Event deck, which you draw from in the Chaos Phase. I have to say, I wasn't overly impressed with the dice, They're pretty standard and aren't a patch on the Space Hulk custom dice which I thought they might be. You also get 12 room cards and a selection of tokens.

And now, the minis. 

As said above, you get a standard Chaos Lord sprue with which to make your Sorcerer, meaning that if you are a Chaos player you get another set of bitz to play with. For those that (like myself) don't play Chaos, be careful. It's spiky! Also on the sprue is the Familiar, which is used as a turn counter so don't forget him. After that there is 3 snap fit Chaos marines and 3 sprues of 5 Cultists.

Add a little glue...

Now the Assassins. These guys are pretty nice, and there are rumors floating about that they'll be seen in clam packs in a few months time. Each piece is numbered, and the assembly guide strongly suggests building numbers, which certainly made what could have been fiddly kits pretty easy to manage.

Culexus Assassin

Callidus Assassin

Eversor Assassin

And finally the Vindicare Assassin. I've left his pillar removable until he is painted as it would restrict access quite a lot if glued. 

Avengers Assassins Assemble!

As the game is a 1-4 player Co-op game, I took it down to the local club in the week and three of us gave it a go. Overall it was a pretty fun, quick moving game. The idea is for the four assassins to work their way through the initial board, finding both the teleporter room and the teleporter control room before moving to the Temple of Shades and slaying the Sorcerer before he can launch his ritual, which occurs in Chaos turn 16.

 Whether it was luck of the draw with event cards or good rolling, we found it relatively easy to work our way through the initial board without too much hassle before teleporting all four assassins to the Temple of Shades together. The Chaos Marines didn't put up much more of a fight than the cultists did, mainly down to the assassins having saved most of their ability tokens until the temple "just in case". At this point we decided things were a little too easy, so looked through the Achievements at the back of the rules and saw one for slaying Trask when he started with 6 wounds rather than 3. Since nobody had activated Trask at that point we decided to go with it, and ended up killing the Terminator Lord before turn 13 was up, with plenty of time to spare. 

Only one of the assassins took any damage during the game and at that point, it was a case of not rolling a one on the next turn to heal themselves. While three turns to spare might not seem a lot, that's roughly 20% of the game to spare, which we decided was probably a little much.

 In future, to make it a little more competitive for the Chaos side we decided that it might be a good idea for all Cultists in rooms to start "On Alert" when they are spotted rather than "Stunned" so they have the chance to deal damage when they first get interacted with rather than once the assassins have had a chance to kill them. Another idea we had was to add d3-d6 more cultists per turn rather than just what the event card for the turn states. This might lead to the boards getting quite crowded though. Our final idea was to replace all of the cultists with Chaos Marines, and the Chaos Marines with Terminators (creating a new card with slightly lower stats than the Sorcerer Lord).

Overall, the Assassins are great minis with a load of detail and the game is decent. It is only one mission though, so to get some replay value out of it you might have to go through some of the Xbox style achievements in the back of the rules or come up with something else yourselves.