I first got into miniatures gaming in the early ’90s with the Milton Bradley/Games Workshop joint project Space Crusade. Overall, I think the game worked rather well. Three Marine players would board a drifting space hulk infested by an odd mix of Orks, Chaos Space Marines, Genestealers and the Necrons’ great grandfather. We never could figure out why every faction outside of the Imperium and Eldar could get along so swimmingly when aboard a drifting hulk.

A friend of mine took a similar path into gaming, only he did it with the Mutant Chronicles version of Space Crusade: Siege of the Citadel.


Most of the gameplay is extremely similar (almost identical in places) to Space Crusade or Heroquest. And the game concept fit into the Mutant Chronicles universe much better than Space Crusade fit into 40k.

Like Space Crusade, this is meant as an introduction to miniatures gaming- the minis aren’t as high a quality as the Heartbreaker line presented in Warzone. However, the gameplay is fast and crazy, and there’s a lot of screw your buddy going on as the different corporate mercenaries try to obtain their objectives (and keep their friends from getting theirs).

In one of the scenarios we played, I got to play the undead Legion and was chasing down and eating the characters with a giant monster called an Ezoghoul.

Altogether, it was a great, lighthearted game. It actually makes me want to reconstruct my old Space Crusade set. I know for a fact that I’ve got enough Gretchin hanging around…