Space Hulk

Space Hulk is an old boardgame published by Games Workshop. One player controls space marines in heavy powered armour who board derelict star ships called "space hulks", in order to perform a variety of missions. These usually involve retrieving some kind of data or going to a particular room to access the ship's controls. They are opposed by aliens called "Genestealers" that live on these derelicts and try to kill the boarding space marines. These aliens, of course, are controlled by the other player. The game is played on a board made up of interlocking sections (with jigsaw puzzle like connectors) that can be rearranged to give a variety of different maps. The space marines and Genestealers are represented by nicely detailed Games Workshop miniatures from their Warhammer 40k line. I've played some computer adaptations of the game and found it to be a lot of fun, so I've been trying to get a copy. The problem is, the game is long out of print, and commands very high prices on eBay, if you can find it at all.

Interestingly enough, I found out that Games Workshop has released the rules of the 2nd edition of the game free as a .pdf file, along with .pdf file pictures of the original board sections. So I've started a project to create a set of the game.

The board sections:
The board sections are easy, if tedious, to make. You can simply print them out on regular paper using a colour printer, glue the paper to cardboard, and cut out the sections. The full game has some 54 individual sections, so I'm still in the middle of doing that.

The rulebook:

You just have to print it out. No problem.

The miniatures:

This is the cool part of the game - collecting and painting miniatures is a fun hobby by itself.

For the game, I'm using some heavy powered armour miniatures I already have from a different manufacturer (Ground Zero Games), but at around the same scale. These will stand in as the space marines.

This represents a space marine with a basic ranged weapon, called a "storm bolter" in Space Hulk. I'll use the guy on the far right with the antenna on his back as a Sergeant in Space Hulk. The guys with two boxes on their shoulders will be regular space marines - I'll just say they have searchlights mounted. The guy on the left has a heavy weapon, which I will use to represent a "flamer" (basically a flamethrower) in Space Hulk.

A closer look at the heavy weapon guy.

With the Genestealers, I don't have any models, so I ordered a bunch of them on eBay. These miniatures are fairly common, since they are a common troop type in the table top wargame Warhammer 40k, which uses the same models. I got some painted ones and unpainted ones - I might have to repaint the others anyways.

These ones are already painted by the previous owner, but I might change the colour scheme.

These are freshly assembled out of the box, plastic-coloured.

Well, I'll keep working on these and see how they all turn out.