Warhammer 40K: Betrayal at Calth Review

There is no doubt that the venerable Games Workshop, one of the longest-lasting companies in the hobby games business, has entered not only a period of reformation but also a period of renaissance. The Nottingham-based company is just completely knocking it out of the park one release after another. In particular, the quality of their boxed games has been uniformly stellar and if you are looking for an inception point at which GW essentially turned a corner after what some may consider quite a few wilderness years, the 2015 release Horus Heresy: Betrayal at Calth is it. This is an outstanding piece of design that brings the concepts and lore of Heresy-era Warhammer 40k to an accessible, fun to play skirmish board game.

Now, before the board gaming crowd gets too excited about the prospect of some bona fide Space Marine action without the need for tape measures and a terrain table, let's make it clear up front. This is still very much a hobby miniatures product, and if you have no experience with at least building Citadel-style miniatures, you are going to be quite intimidated when you open the box and are greeted with sprue after sprue of glorious Mark IV Astartes power armor pieces. The figures must be clipped out of the sprues and assembled with glue. There are some decisions to be made as to how to outfit the tactical squads. And they really need to be painted- otherwise, you won't be able to tell an Ultramarine apart from a Word Bearer, and that could lead you to commit heresy.

"You mean I just bought a box full of tiny guns and shoulder pads?"

Be forewarned as well that this is an expensive game, but I will defend its price without hesitation because it is a Cadillac game- a premium title that is truly a cut above the rest of the marketplace. The models are outstanding in terms of quality, making even the best put out by other leading games manufacturers look like bubblegum machine figures. And you get a lot of them, including heavy armor Terminators, a Dreadnaught, and a few leader figures. If you are looking at building a Heresy-era Space Marine army to play the proper miniatures games, this box is actually a tremendous value.

But Betrayal at Calth is ultimately a board game with miniatures, and you get plenty of extremely high quality board game parts with it as well including custom dice and lovely punchboard terrain tiles. The illustrations are incredible, the lore-writing is simply unparalleled, and the rules-writing is also outstanding. Calth is a simple game, really, with a very basic activation scheme, area-scaled hexes that parse movement and also determine compositions of squads, and some good old fashioned dice-rolling to determine if that Multi-Melta or those Lightning Claws strike true- or if the Mark IV armor does its job. There are just five possible actions (all variations of moving or attacking) with some penalties for being pinned or for attacking over or through a couple of terrain types. This is an economical design without any fat or filler intended to create artificial depth.

Don't be intimidated by scenes like this where the paint jobs look awesome- a simple paint scheme or even just spraying them a single color works just fine.

Where the game gets really compelling is in how it encourages players to develop effective sub-groups of fighters and then use ranged and melee wargear to an advantage. The differences between the weapons are more than just attack strength, there are also Critical Effects that can be rolled that cause units to do things like lose a Tactical Point (used to activate during a round) or lose their armor save. The choice of weapons is huge, and it needs to be because there are only a couple of types of units in this game. What you outfit them with is crucial, as is combining your units to seize objectives, defend chokepoints, or plow through some Loyalists.

There is also a cardplay element, which adds some fun surprises. Each of the six scenarios is very well-written and featured special rules to illustrate the narrative and offer interesting twists on the core rules. And there are simple but effective rules regarding that awesome Contemptor Dreadnaught that distinguish it tremendously from the non-mechanized troops in the game. It's little flourishes that make a pretty rudimentary design into something special.

I think this game is completely, unrepentantly awesome. It feels very much like a classic late 1980s or early 1990s design- not unlike Space Hulk or HeroQuest- but with just a touch of modernization and of course much higher production values. It's a quick-playing game too. If you and a buddy have an afternoon and evening to spare you could even play through all six scenarios.

But above else, what I love about this game is that it feels like Warhammer, 100%. Some of the other more recent board game efforts set in the 40k world have been good and even great, but there is a quality to this game that feels completely authentic and in a way the others have not. It could be that it requires the modelling and painting. Or it could be that it covers a more "deep cut" part of the 40k lore. With that said, some may find the Space Marine versus Space Marine storyline somewhat dull- but fans of the "30k" setting or the great Dan Abnett novels set during this period are going to find much to like.

If there is one thing that disappoints me about Betrayal at Calth it is that it seems to have been something of a dead end. When I first played this game, I thought it would be awesome if they did more games using the same system- I thought about how cool an Eldar versus Tyranid game with it would be. However, the follow-up game Burning of Prospero went in a somewhat different direction. It's a great game too in its own respect, but this game is overall the superior choice. If you are willing to invest the time, effort and money that Betrayal at Calth requires, you might find a very rewarding game that blows other skirmish designs out of the water.