Necromunda: Armoury Row I

Necromunda has been in danger of mouldering away in my cupboard, unplayed. As the game that really concreted me into social gaming at University, this was unacceptable! So I did something silly - I started a solo campaign.

It started out as an attempt to learn the rules a bit, see if it still worked and if I still liked it. It did! I do! So it quickly turned from a bit of idling of an evening into something more organised. These articles will be half review, half battle report, detailing my experiment with the game and giving you a breakdown of the end of the campaign.

Underhive Jive

Underhive has a good rules set, full of silliness, complexity and detail. All the things I remember enjoying from the original game, with some of the kinks ironed out. It's an improvement, on the whole!

You want to knock someone backwards into a pool of acidic goo using flaming shotgun rounds, leaping acrobatically through the tunnels of an industrial city-waste whilst high on combat drugs with silly names? Hack a door terminal so it crushes your foes? Fire pistols in all directions until you run dry on ammo and have to headbutt your way to victory? This is your game. Wild Snake, bomb rats, icrotic slime and Mung Vases - it's all there.

Back in the day, before the expansions, a legit criticism of Necromunda was that all gangs started off so similar, it took a while for your house flavour to creep in. Now, gangs feel very distinct, each with their own wild gear and tactics cards. Straight away, you're playing as the archetype you chose, and it feels much more like it should.

Delaque are kings of the silent sneaky game, sniping from the dark and infiltrating not just the board, but your enemies gangs. Van Saar shoot to kill with hilarious radiation weapons that slowly cook your gangers. Goliaths are unstoppable brutes, refusing to stay down but bouncing up high on dangerous cocktails of steroids. Escher twirl and poison with wild abandon. I haven't even tried the others yet! But it's a detailed, over-the-top, silly hoot of a blood bath. Love it.

New kinks added in, sure! When it first came out, the rules in the box were good. Fast, furious and all in one place. Although several expansions later, you can't really accuse it of being quick-to-play.  There is a lot of rules bloat, and you're best off picking and choosing to keep your favourite ones. They recommend keeping your campaigns short and simple, and that is definitely the way forward.

GW has put a financial wedge into it by the way they released the rulebooks, first as four updates to the original book, each detailing a new gang and some new options. And then by releasing those as complete hardbacks, there's a very nasty pricetag on getting the 'core' stuff for the original and beloved gangs from the first edition. The rules aren't particularly well laid-out, either, there's a lot of going back and forth between books. I haven't really used my rulebook from the box set that much, but it's already falling apart.

Two new books adding in new campaign mechanics, environmental hazards and the Enforcer gangs adds even more cost to that. By that point, you're about £150 down before you've bought gangs, mdf scenery from the after-market, tactics cards for the gangs and anything else you've succumbed to, you poor sap. Anyone thinking 'oh, you just need one box of models for the whole game' is in for an unpleasant surprise.

Not that you can't do it, mind! And if you still have all your original models, you're in a good place. Search the net hard enough and the rules can be found on various websites (Yaktribe has a great campaign manager, although their server can be a little wobbly), which helps take the sting out of the inevitable campaign paperwork.

And look, if you are spending money, Necromunda has some of the best kits going. Forge World stuff is at a hugely silly price, of course, but looks great. Even those rulebooks are nicely illustrated, if not quite with the character of the original (lots of lovely pics of individual gangers and model photography, very little in terms of illustrated set pieces or background art).

TL;DR - it's a great game. Too expensive by far, even by GW standards I'd say, but what do you expect?

Let's Have a Row

So having bought my way into the original box, two gangs and a wealth of aftermarket scenery, really I had to try out the campaign rules. Armoury Row was born, a four-gang collision to sample one of the new campaign mechanics.

This is the simplest of them, with stripped-down turf rules. Although it's called a Turf War, it doesn't go into the detail of old in terms of who owns which strip clubs. This is a clash around Reputation, a sort of victory point score. After a pre-determined amount of time, the gangs with the two highest Reputation fight a last battle to determine who wins this particular piece of underhive real estate, and you have a winner.

With only my own time to waste, I decided on a three-month cycle. I'd try and resolve two fights for each of the gangs in each cycle, basically about one solo game a week, each of which took me around an hour and a half to play out. I took it easy, so it ended up taking more like four months at a very relaxed pace.

Before each game, there's a dice roll to see if your House gives you a helping hand. A dice roll, of course, with bonuses if your gang is losing in the ratings. This helps even things out, giving you extra gear or a spare ganger or two from time to time. It's also a harder to die permanently than it used to be, plus as I mentioned, gangs are more developed and unique to start with. Skills and esoteric guns from the get-go! Hurrah!

Here's what I came up with for the gangs in the game:

• Delaque - The Blank Mirrors, a fairly large gang without too much starting gear, but a focus on silent, short range guns like their unique Flechette pistols and throwing knives
• Van Saar - Eschelon Containment Ltd, a very small gang armed to the teeth with powerful gear like like plasma guns, energy shields and the like
• Escher - The Whipporwills, a big gang with a nice mix of combat slashers and las-firepower, plus more than a few gas weapons
• Goliath - The Sump City Slashers, another smaller gang with the best possible gear I could get, but emphasising close combat rather than range

Learning the rules and not knowing what might or might not be a winning selection, the games seemed pretty even-handed. Battles are often over pretty fast. You don't need a big table, the Zone Mortalis tiles keep it all pretty close range. I-go-you-go mechanics mean that you need to pick the right moment to commit to an attack, or you end up out-manouvered, and some scenarios give one or the other gang a decent advantage before the game starts.

But for every game where a larger gang won the battle of attrition, there was a game where the smaller group fought back with suprising ferocity. Twists! Turns! Gangers crawling through pipes to ambush you from behind! Frag grenades blasting people into molten iron vats! Burning juves dropping from gantries into the eternal darkness of Hive Bottom!

Where did it all lead? Well, entering the last cycle of the campaign, it was pretty much neck and neck. Nobody had a big lead in reputation, although the smaller and better equipped gangs had pulled ahead slightly. Van Saar seem to have an edge in terms of their shooting game being more reliable than the others, but wow do they go down hard if you reach them. Goliaths were proving to be my favourites, their mechanics are hilarious! And I was just starting to get to grips with Delaque tactics - flood the field with smoke that your own guys can see through, then unleash short-range hell.

So then I did something I came to regret. Obviously it's not designed as a solo game, and I was missing out on the surprise tactics cards and general banter of company. So I brought in a ringer for the last few games.

If there's one gamer out there who can manage to lose a solo campaign, it would be me...

(some images taken from a forthcoming pc game adaptation of Necromunda, Underhive Wars by, others taken at random from the net)