Boy, am I ever behind! In the interest of getting back to our regular shenanigans, though, I wanted to share something that’s been happening in the background over the course of the last several months. Me and my friend @kinpatsusamurai are fond of weird miniature-agnostic skirmish games, particularly those from Snarling Badger Studios. You might recall seeing Space Station Zero being a fixture of the blog about a year and change ago, and this time we’re doing a Warhammer-reskinned run of the Majestic 13 co-op campaign. Kinpatsusamurai’s terrain game is always on point but he’s elevated it with this campaign to a point where I feel like I have to get this out into the world.

To give a rough overview of the game, Majestic 13 a deeply X-COM reminiscent experience where divergent teams of Earth operatives from all sorts of different backgrounds (including naturalized “gray” alien species and hybrids) team up to repel a covert planetary invasion. The game features initiative-based activations where two out of every three missions are functionally mini-boss fights, and the third is a special encounter. So far we have only had to deal with horde battles in the “special” ones but we’re bracing to get hit with bigger, badder bosses as the game goes on. This game is also not one that holds your hand, by any stretch of the imagination – out of the six missions that we have played up to this point we have technically suffered a failure on five of them, even if we have achieved all of our secondary objectives and gained plenty of experience points for our operatives.

So, how do you reskin a game like Majestic 13 with Warhammer 40,000? Turns out it is surprisingly easy, especially when two nerds with multiple armies get together and decide it’s going to be a narrative campaign. A ragtag group of Astra Militarum led by a single Space Marine organizing planetary defense are graced by the presence of totally codex-complaint and not remotely heretical Blood Ravens to bolster their efforts (and steal anything that isn’t pinned down, most likely.) Their opponent is a shadowy group that have started to unleash Chaos Spawn on the planet’s regular populace, finally unmasked in the first special mission of the campaign: the Night Lords themselves. In the flesh. (Other people’s flesh, mostly.) Our first two missions were bloodbaths, because we were accidentally giving the enemy monsters three activations a round by default instead of two – there is a conditional third that they can get under certain circumstances depending on unit type, but giving it to them automatically made the early game a little unwinnable. The Night Lords swept us hard in the first special mission but bloodied their noses on the way down, and now that we understand the ruleset better we’re feeling much more optimistic about our chances.

The game has been a lot of fun so far as a casual run, but I’d be remiss not to mention that I have some ulterior motive here! I’m trying to get back into 9th edition because, while the 11th edition iron is hot right now, I haven’t quite yet made the jump into it, and in a year where hobby dollars are scarce I am finding that a lot of my beloved 9th edition books and cards are at a steal price online. Maybe Blood Ravens are just the right chapter for me, after all!