Author:  Christopher Beck

Embrace the Chaos…

For some gamers atmosphere and theme are a major part of the gaming experience. What might mechanically be just chit placement and cube allocation becomes a different world when the workers chits are shaped like medieval townspeople and the cubes represent building materials for a cathedral. Some games (like Chess) are abstract, lacking in any theme or story, and allowing the player to focus on the pure strategic elements of a typically simple playfield. In other games, theme is a veneer, a gloss of story to give coherence to otherwise unconnected actions (I mean, how does placing disks relate to farming anyway?). However, there is a select group of games where, like pen and paper role-playing, the thematic elements serve as the core of game play and the mechanics are built around the theme (rather than the other way around). Fantasy Flight Games’s Chaos in the Old World falls in this latter category, putting the players in the gooey iron boots, talons, or protoplasmic tentacles of one of the Warhammer universe’s four magnificently evil Chaos gods. In fact, it is Chaos in the Old World’s (hereafter CitOW) strong adherence to its genuinely novel and entertaining theme that helps players overlooks its sometimes glaring flaws. To sum up my feeling, despite the extremely poor balancing of the game’s four factions, Chaos in the Old World is one of my favorite medium-heavy weight games.

In CitOW players take the role of one of the major “bad guys” of Game Workshop’s now prolific series of Warhammer fantasy table top games, books, computer games, and role-playing sets. It is to Fantasy Flight and Games Workshop’s credit that they have designed a board game with mechanics, art, flavor text, and components that are largely successful in making the player actually feel like he or she is an all-powerful, horrifying deity in a struggle for dominance against the forces of good, but mostly against other all-powerful, horrifying rivals.

For those not familiar with the Warhammer Universe, the lands of the Empire (mostly humans but also including some dwarves and elves in coalition) are constantly beset by orcs, rat-men (known as Skaven), and many other destabilizing forces. However, the Empire’s main enemies are the forces of Chaos, whose corrupting influence are the antithesis to the Empires dogged adherence to order, purity, and control. These Chaotic “rebels” against the sometimes oppressive grip of the Empire are spiritually directed by four shadowy beings from the Warp (a hellish and ever-changing “otherworld” that is the source of magic and mutation). These four beings are embodiments of fundamental Chaotic forces:  Khorne, the god of blood, battle, and destruction; Slaanesh, the lord of pain, pleasure, temptation, lust, and vice; Nurgle, the master of disease, decay, and filth; and Tzeentch, the great conspirator, overlord of magic, mutation, and fate. Lucky for humanity, these four awesome forces hardly collaborate, and each has its own vision for how the world must end, be it in blood, decay, instability, or… um… unspeakable appetites and pleasures. In CitOW each player will take the mantle of one of these gods, vying to bring the corruption to the world in their own way and opposing the plots and maneuvers of their rival gods.

How shall I serve thee, my dark master…

Where CitOW really shines is in its ability to really make each faction feel and play in a completely different manner. A strategy that one player might use playing Khorne will be completely useless playing Nurgle, and this clear demarcation of roles not only makes the game almost feel like role-playing, but greatly adds to the value as every player will feel like they are playing a new game each time he or she switches gods. This is accomplished, mechanically, in several ways. First, each faction in CitOW gets its own unique units that have statistics and powers unique to each side and can be upgraded during the course of play to be even more unique. These units fall into three distinct types for each side: cultists, warriors, and greater daemon, and each unit type has a distinct role to play within the game.

Before I continue on about the roles of the units and how they are different, I want to make a brief statement about component quality. Fantasy Flight Games is well known to produce some of the highest quality components, game boards, and accessories, and CitOW is no exception. While the cultist units for each side look identical (except for their color), every side’s warriors and greater daemons are completely different models. For example, the warriors of Slaanesh are creepy women with crab-claw like hands, dressed in gothic S&M gear while Khorne’s warriors are long headed and long horned brutes similar to more traditional ideas of “demons.” The many (and I mean MANY) chits are of high quality cardboard stock with a linen-like finish and are very durable and well painted. The cards are also of good quality card stock, and come in both regular card sizes and the “mini-euro” card size. It is hard to call the board “attractive” as it is a map that looks like it is made of stretched out and bloody human skin, but it is very detailed and adds much to the theme and atmosphere by being so gruesome. My only two criticisms would be in the cultist figures and the cards players use to cast magic on the board. First, despite the cultist figures being a very detailed and attractive mold, FFG decided that they should be all holding a long “flag-pole” standard topped with a spiky symbol of chaos. Yes, this does make them look neater, but that spiky symbol catches on all the other figures and, unless you are extremely careful storing each man, it will be the first piece to bend and break off. Obviously this is not detrimental to game play at all, but it does disappoint that the plastic is so easily breakable (in comparison to the harder plastic used in Runewars or Descent). Second, FFG choose to use the mini-euro cards to represent magic spells, which are drawn every turn and used as a “hand.” This is frankly puzzling, as these cards contain often contain lengthy text and are to be constantly held in hand, yet they are the smallest in the game. This means they are slightly unwieldy for larger hands (their small size makes them slip and hard to shuffle) and the text can be a little small. I would have used the regular cards for this, and the smaller ones for the less used Empire cards.

Going back to mechanics, it should be said that the game is rather complex. I would consider CitOW to be a medium-heavy weight game. This is not surprising, considering FFG’s catalog, but CitOW is attractive as, since it is playable in 3-4 hours by 3-4 players, it fits into that niche in between those long epic games like Twilight Imperium and the more casual games like Cave Troll or Cosmic Encounter. The complexity of the game comes from the interaction between the player and the board, and the interaction between the three different types of units. There are three ways to win the game (and the multiple paths to victory are a stroke of genius). Players can advance to the “You Win the Game” part of a Chaos Threat Dial by carrying out actions specific to their god. For instance, Khorne advances his threat dial by successfully killing enemy units, Nurgle moves his dial by corrupting areas marked as “populous,” Slaanesh gains threat by corrupting areas containing randomly placed noble tokens and heroes, and Tzeentch moves up the dial by corrupting places with a combination of magic or “warpstone” tokens. The dials for each god do different things, giving upgrades to units, adding or subtracting corruption tokens, adding noble or warpstone tokens and each god has a unique number of “ticks” on the dial to reach “You Win” (Nurgle has the most, while Tzeentch and Slaanesh have the shortest). The second way to win is to reach 50 points on the victory track. Points are gained in two ways, “dominating” a region by having more units than anyone else in the region and a total higher than the region’s resistance score (if the region has a 3 by its name, you have to have 3 units in the region and be the highest total to dominate) or get a onetime “influx” of points by “ruining” the region. Regions are ruined when they get a total of 12 corruption tokens, which are placed by cultist units, granting points to the player with the highest and second highest totals of corruption and to the players whose corruption pushed the region over the line. Lastly, the game ends if all eight of the randomly selected Empire cards are drawn (Empire cards represent events in the game and do many things), and the person with the highest victory point total wins.

These three paths to victory led each faction to pursue vastly different routes. As Nurgle’s magic and units all provide different ways to corrupt regions but are offensively and defensively, the Nurgle player tends to pursue a victory point win, hope for a shorter game, and avoid conflict. On the other side of the spectrum, Khorne, whose troops are the strongest offensively and whose threat dial advancement relies on killing enemy units, will play an aggressive wargame and try to find ways to stretch his expensive warriors across the board. Tzeentch and Slaanesh are a little more “middle of the road” between the two other gods, but Slaanesh’s minions are far more defensive and can coexist with Khorne, while Tzeentch will attempt to keep Khorne shut down, to corrupt alongside Nurgle, and to keep Khorne away from the weak Nurgle to avoid too many rival dial advances. The conflicts between the sides, and the different ways players try to use the strengths of their gods is fascinating, and leads to a very dynamic, unpredictable (perhaps chaotic), and a high level of player interaction. There are little mechanics that aid this, such as the Khorne player always placing units first (so Nurgle and the others can retreat) and the fact that it costs the same “power” to move a unit from region to region as to place a completely new unit (also aids Nurgle, whose cultist and warrior cost 1, versus the more expensive units of the other gods). So games of CitOW are highly tactical, despite the chaotic nature, as players decide who to attack, when to run, where to cast spells, and what units to summon. CitOW is highly successful at merging elements from several genres here, such as the “Ameritrash” aspects of armies and dice rolling, or the “Eurogame” elements of worker placement and victory points. It is, in many ways, a perfect bridge between these major genres, and this will please many different types of players. If one of your players hates dice rolling and combat, but loves influence and worker placement games, make him Nurgle or Tzeentch. If you have a Risk or Fortress America junkie, give him Khorne. CitOW has something that will please most any gamer.

I will no longer tolerate your failure!

While CitOW is certainly on my list of top ten favorite games, there are a few things that keep it from seizing that top slot. First, while the difference between factions is what makes the game so interesting and dynamic, it also makes the game massively imbalanced. The factions are far from being equal, and clearly some of them have a much easier time being victorious and have much clearer strategies, namely Khorne and Slaanesh. Khorne is relatively straightforward (and makes an excellent first faction to people unfamiliar with these types of games) and his emphasis on combat, with his reasonably lengthy threat dial (decent number of turns to “You Win”) make it easy for him to totally eschew the corruption mechanics and use his powers to simply terrorize the other players, particularly weak Nurgle. Slaanesh has one of the shortest paths to victory on the threat dial, and his units are heavily defensive and can “crowd control” enemy units. Slaanesh’s spells are also a bit more straightforward and his corruption goal – to corrupt regions containing noble tokens – is easy to reach and easy to plan. The other two gods are far more complex. Tzeetch and his emphasis on magic make him a bit more difficult to play, as each card does something whose utility might not be immediately apparent (particularly to new players) and his unit upgrades are also a little more difficult to incorporate into straightforward plans. Nurgle is, by far, the most difficult to play (but in a personal note, my favorite faction) as it is nearly impossible to win a threat dial victory and he must wholly rely upon gaining victory points with domination and ruination of regions.

However, once aware of this imbalance in the factions, good players will tend to factor this into their strategies and “self correct.” Because everyone knows Khorne and Slaanesh are powerhouses, they tend to make life more difficult for them, and Nurgle, whose power starts very low but grows unexpectedly (even this follows the theme of disease and rot) can sometimes sneakily lay low until it is too late for the other powers to stop him. Notice however, I said that “good players” will self-correct this imbalance – it is rarely more painful in board gaming to see a player, whether unfamiliar with the rules or just not good at this type of strategy, completely throw off the game by making poor moves that benefit other players (i.e. placing weak units alongside Khorne or moving tokens to strange places). Although the “kingmaker” effect is present in many games, it has a much more marked presence in CitOW.

Additionally, CitOW is deceptively complex, but the rules are not particularly intuitive and the rule book is, at best, poorly laid out and, at worst, full or errata. In fact, in my edition of the game, the character sheets for the gods are even incorrect and contradict the rulebook! This has all been fixed by a quickly released FAQ and errata sheet, but it requires going to the FFG website to get it (something new owners may not do) and without the rules corrections, the game is even MORE imbalanced. Further, despite the fact that I had read the rules multiple times, my gaming group played the game incorrectly three times due to confusing wording and details in the book. If you realize this beforehand and make sure to read the rules carefully (particularly the rules stating that, despite the number of advancement tokens on the threat dial, the dial can only go up ONCE for the tokens and ONCE for having the most tokens – as a bonus – per turn) then you will save yourself a lot of effort. Lastly, the cards used in the game are nearly as complex as a collectable card game like Magic: The Gathering, and have similar exceptions and conflicts, most of which are covered in the FAQ, so be aware of this when two players put down cards and the fighting between them starts over who can do what.

There are some elements of CitOW that might turn off some players. First, for a game so heavily tactical, luck tends to play a large factor (the same could be said of real warfare, however). Dice rolls can ruin the best plans, victory can come from a good roll or opportune drawing of a card, and the randomly selected empire cards can create situations that benefit, or severely hamper, one player in particular. There is little that can be done to mitigate this and, although it doesn’t bother me, if you don’t like games that contain an element of chance then CitOW may not appeal to you. Another limitation in CitOW is that it absolutely cannot be played as a two-player game and even a three-player game will feel like it is missing an important element (an entire god). Three players can be fun, but the game is clearly optimized for four, so that each god is represented. As there are only four gods, if you gaming group numbers five or six, CitOW is also going to present some problems, unless you form “god teams.” Finally, the theme of the game is extremely gruesome, the board is a flayed skin and the cards contain such gems as “A Rain of Pus.” Those unfamiliar with Warhammer may not be as drawn to the theme (although two of my group don’t know the back fiction and adopted it quickly, but you should note they aren’t exactly the typical gamer). Squeamish people might have trouble taking it all in. Also, role-playing an evil god might offend some, and it mostly certainly leads to very cutthroat games, which also might scare off gamers who don’t like face-to-face confrontation.

All these criticisms aside, Chaos in the Old World is an excellent intertwining of several different board game genres and styles that results in a complex, yet rewarding experience. The theme, far from being tacked on, provides entertainment in its own right and the ability to role-play a massive force of destruction and corruption is novel (compared to how many games out there are about shipping and merchants) and opens opportunities for some fun interactions between players. The game takes a little while to play, but the time tends to fly by (analysis paralysis can be a problem though, so watch for this) and the action starts in the first turn and only escalates from there. If you can recognize and deal with the asymmetrical balance of the factions, then you won’t find a strategy game that is this deep but has this much flavor. So start plotting against your neighbor, grab your rusted sword, throw a used Kleenex in someone’s food and put on that “come hither” look – Chaos is coming to town!

Phat L00t