So far, I’ve spent a lot of digital ink in this space talking to you folks about some cool games that you could, on a whim, run out and buy at your local game store or by placing an order with any of the fine online retailers out in the nether regions of the Internet, and with new titles practically flooding the marketplace with a regularity that wasn’t seen even back in the board gaming salad days of the 1980s and early 1990s, there’s plenty of readily available games to whet your gaming whistle.

However, if you’re coming into this hobby late in the game, so to speak, you’ve missed out on a good thirty-odd years of gaming. Sure, there’s plenty of gamers out there who are going to tell you that the games of the 1970s and 1980s are too complex, too long, or somehow not as “elegant” as their modern counterparts but I beg to differ; in fact, I think many of the thrills and charms of some of these vintage titles haven’t been bested by anything out there today.

I certainly love opening up a hot-off-the-press game but I have to say that nothing beats the thrill of tracking down an elusive, long out-of-print game that has fallen by the wayside in the seemingly endless crush of newer, faster, better, or whatever games. I think it’s pretty interesting that unlike video games board games rarely become “obsolete” even though certain expectations such as game length and rules complexity have changed over the years. If you’re willing to put in the effort to do a little hunting for an older game and to commit a little time to learning to play it, the rewards can be quite surprising. So in future columns, I’m going to be opening up the ol’ game crypt to spotlight some forgotten or neglected classics. Most of these games can be found on eBay or other online board gaming marketplaces; you could even get lucky and find a couple of them in a thrift store or yard sale.

But first up out of the crypt is a game you’re unlikely to find in such venues, at least in the United States. It’s SPACE CRUSADE, one of several games produced by the late 1980s-early 1990s partnership of Milton Bradley and Games Workshop. Rather than resulting in a WARHAMMER-themed version of LIFE, as such a team-up would likely produce these days, this trans-Atlantic powerhouse turned out some pretty great mass-market games that have proven to be very influential and still loved today such as HEROQUEST and BATTLEMASTERS.

The box.

Most of these games made it to US stores, but arguably the best of the lot was SPACE CRUSADE, designed by Steven Baker, which was never released in America due to its similarity to HEROQUEST. Indeed, SPACE CRUSADE is to WARHAMMER 40,000 what HEROQUEST was to WARHAMMER FANTASY- a light, scenario-based dungeon crawl (albeit on a spaceship) in which one player plays the bad guys against other players who are attempting to accomplish a goal. It’s a format some of you may recognize in games like Fantasy Flight’s DOOM or DESCENT: JOURNEYS IN THE DARK and I think if you play SPACE CRUSADE you’ll be surprised at how much of that early design turned up in those newer games.

Unlike those games, however, SPACE CRUSADE is incredibly simple and stripped down; the last game I played featured a three minute rules discussion that had everyone up and running with only a few questions throughout the game. It’s not a heavy game by any stretch of the word and it’s the kind of thing you break out when you want to toss some dice, mimic the sounds of dying aliens all night, or crack jokes about that one Gretchin that just won’t die.

The Space Marine players each control five marines: four squaddies armed with the players’ choice of various cool weapons and a commander who gets to choose from a different assortment of death-dealing implements. These Marines are tasked with boarding a derelict ship infested with WARHAMMER 40K bad guys— all of ‘em, at least those that were available in 1990. (If this idea sounds similar to another GW game, SPACE HULK, well...it is.) So there’s Orks, Gretchin, Genestealers, Androids (Necrons, really), and even some nasty Chaos Space Marines, and generally the missions tend to be to get somewhere, get out, or kill something important like an ED-209 style Dreadnaught.

On a turn, a player gets to move and shoot with each of his figures. Simple line-of-sight rules and various weapon effects pretty much round out any complexity and there are also a few special equipment cards and one-time orders available to the Marines. The alien player gets to do pretty much the same thing, but there’s a pretty big catch: the alien forces are unrevealed until a Marine actually “sees” them. So the blip counter behind the door could be a lowly Gretchin that can barely fire his space-musket or it could be a rocket launcher wielding Chaos Space Marine. It’s a simple, neat system that calls to mind the tension and atmosphere of the motion tracker scenes in ALIENS, to which the game is clearly indebted. Combat is pretty basic- each weapon fires a number of white or red dice (red are better) and try to get a number higher than the armor value of the target. Aliens and Space Marines take only one hit to kill, but the Commanders get six hit points.

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