Can you run regular Space Marines in a game of Space Hulk? Why yes, you can.

One of the major changes that occurred to the game of Space Hulk as it developed was a bidding system. The general gist is as follows.

Bidding System

The squads, weapons and equipment available to the Space Marine player are allocated points values which correspond to their value and utility in a game.

Rather than being granted a specific squad or loadout for a mission gratis, and the allocation of which players controls which faction, players instead attempt to underbid each other to complete the mission as the Space Marines using as fewer points as possible.

The result of this is that one can field quite unexpected units on even standard missions.

Beakies

One of the first tranches of units given point costs were standard issue Space Marines, known in the Rogue Trader era as “Beakies” due to their helmet design. These are possible to field in all missions with point costs, but an introductory mission “Denzark’s Hammer” was created with standard predefined squads to ease players into this new paradigm.

Loadouts

There are a few salient differences in the use of Beakies instead of Terminators in Space Hulk, roughly summarised as being more manouverable but with weaker weapons and worse in close combat. This is somewhat balanced in the predefined Denzark’s Hammer lists that all marines have frag and crack grenades, missile launchers with unlimited plasma missiles, and sergeants with melta bombs and plasma grenades.

A Need for Timing

One of the things my opponent and I found was that without the Marine-side timer things would just take an incredibly long time – I think we were playing for close to 2.5 hours on this mission, and both started to flag part-way through.

Overall review

We found that the additional weapons and equipment did risk a little analysis paralysis – but increasing familiarity meant were able to work through that before it became too acute.