Chainsaw Warrior game WIP

I have been working on a hybrid of Space Hulk and Chainsaw Warrior – basically using Space Hulk movement and turn sequence with Chainsaw Warrior models and equipment. I created a basic layout in Photoshop of a 10×10 square grid of rooms, 1 foot in total and printed off four copies. These represent two floors, with each staircase connecting to the one above it.

Prototype Chainsaw Warrior Board

I don’t have all the models yet, so quite a few stand-ins had to be used. A big minotaur for the Meat Machine, a wraith for Darkness and Plaguebearers for the mutants. The zombies are fantasy zombies – we’re working on some modern style ones from Wargames Factory. The rats and chaos agents are in their final form though.

There were two Chainsaw Warriors, each leading a squad of four troopers, who had 60 minutes of real time to fight their way through to Darkness. Each time they got LOS into a new room, a room card was turned over. Doors were found to be locked on a roll of 6, and wandering zombies were simulated by one zombie coming in each turn from a stairwell.

The Chainsaw Warriors managed to fight through to Darkness, and in the closing minutes one was killed, but the other managed to get a successful shot in with the second laser lance as seen above (pennies were being used for doors). It was a very useful playtest, revealing a number of things:

1. The layout had too many tiny rooms. Since then I’ve done a new layout with fewer, larger rooms.
2. There needed to be more enemies in the blips and not as many in the rooms. As it was it encouraged them to just shuffle through the map in single file, with the Chainsaw Warrior at the front of each squad demolishing the monsters one by one. Later on when the wandering creatures had built up a bit, it became more exciting as they started to come at the troops from all directions.
3. We originally envisaged laying out cards in the rooms to be turned over as they reached them. As we started to set up, we realised just how long this would take and how messy it would be, so we switched to using a card stack and taking one each time they reached a new room (putting a cleared counter into each room where a card has been turned).
4. The shooting is a bit over-powered if you use the original odds, in Space Hulk you typically get 3 or 4 shots at an enemy before close combat, in Chainsaw Warrior you only got one.

Since then I have created two new layouts, so the next playtest will be done with them, and the rule changes above.