I love miniatures games. I enjoy the strategic and tactical thinking involved, but even more, I love the tactile nature of moving the figures themselves around in an environment, whether it's fully realized three dimensional terrain or just a printed map.
I also love a wide variety of different genres and intellectual properties, so unfortunately the work and investment that most miniatures games require means I can't play in every world I want to. That's why I'm especially intrigued by miniature/board game hybrids such as Monolith's
Conan, with their potential for the depth of a miniatures game contained in a much more manageable (and affordable) box.
This is what drew me to
Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter. I'm a big fan of 2000 AD (the weekly comic book that Judge Dredd appears in), but not quite willing to commit to a full fledged Dredd miniatures game, although the new one from
Warlord Games has some great looking figures. As a self-contained boxed game,
Helter Skelter looked like a great alternative.
The game takes some inspiration from an old Judge Dredd comic book story for it's background: holes have been opening in the fabric of reality, allowing characters from other dimensions to converge on Judge Dredd's Mega-City One. It's a clever idea that allows the game to include four player factions, each based on a different cast of characters from 2000 AD comics.
The game design is terrific. It uses a printed board with irregular areas marked out to handle movement, rather than using a grid or needing a tape measure. The board artwork is functional, clearly indicating important concepts such as cover and line of sight, and it's also beautifully designed and gorgeous to look at. The miniatures, while not fully pre-painted, come with a wash applied, so it's easier to see the figure details, and colored rings for the bases making it clear which figures belong to which faction.
At the start of the game each player is given 10 location cards that match up to the numbered spaces on the board. Five of these are secretly chosen and assigned to the player's five characters, to determine where on the board they will enter play. The other five cards are given to an opponent, and determine where they place their five "shards of reality," colored tokens that can be collected for victory points.
Movement and combat are handled using cards. Each player uses a deck of cards unique to their chosen faction, with cards representing actions their different characters can take such as moving, attacking, or defending. The bulk of the game is managing your cards so you can move your figures to where they need to be, make effective attacks against opposing characters, pick up shards of reality tokens, and still have cards left to defend with when it's your opponent's turn. Collecting a shard of reality or eliminating an opponent's character are each worth one point, and the first player to get to five points wins.
It's a great rules system, providing all the core elements that a miniatures game needs without getting bogged down in the complicated exceptions and situational rules that can plague games like
Heroclix or
X-Wing. But there's one thing missing: a sense of narrative, an interesting story that unfolds on the tabletop. Most games of this type (such as Monolith's
Conan or Leading Edge's
Aliens) have this firmly ingrained by being scenario driven, and that's something that's missing here.
Sure, Helter Skelter provides a back story that explains why the different groups of characters are there and what they're doing, but there really isn't much story once the game starts. Collecting a shard of reality or eliminating an opponent's character are each worth one point, and the first player to get to five points wins. There aren't any additional scenarios offering different victory conditions, so most games tend to be pretty similar, with the only variety being which faction each player is using and which of the two boards they're playing on.
The lack of story certainly isn't a deal-breaker. The extremely elegant design and excellent graphics go a long way towards making up for it, and it's something that could easily be added by official expansions or even house rules. I certainly hope so; a game design this good deserves some more depth.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great design and beautiful production that's a bit let down by a lack of variety and replayability.
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