Core Space - a Review

At the start of this month I received my Kickstarter package from Battle Systems Ltd. for the sci-fi skirmish game, Core Space. As you should know I am a massive fan of the Battle Systems scenery sets. This is their first venture into producing a game using unique 28mm scale figures and their own scenery. I knew that I wanted this as soon as it was first announced. Suffice to say, I am most impressed by everything about this game.
Core Space is a deluxe fully modular three dimensional board game for 1 to 6 players. The game can be played as single missions or campaigns with each player in charge of a team of Traders, their sole objective, to survive in a dangerous galaxy!
Each of your characters can be levelled up with new skills and equipment to help them in their mission, but it will not be easy. The rival teams, gangs and the Galactic Corporation will hinder your every step... but the real threat is the ever expanding plague of synthetic life forms that are slowly purging the galaxy of all life. They are known as the Purge.
Play using a unique 'real search' system and advance your characters between games. It's fast to set up, fast to play, and fully compatible with all the Battle Systems terrain products. To win you will need to follow the Trader credo: salvage, trade, adapt and survive...

Here is a stock photo showing the components of the boxed starter set, which includes a hardback deluxe rulebook, a 2' square neoprene gaming mat, scenery sheets of walls and assorted scatter terrain, PC boards for the Traders and their spaceships, special dice, rulers, counters, pegs, a tie-string bag (for keeping equipment and weapon counters in), event cards and of course, the miniatures, which are colour coded grey for the traders, blue for civilians and beige for the robotic Purge. The quality of all of these components is of a very high standard.

The Deluxe Rulebook runs to over 170 pages and is extremely well written. As well as the game rules are a set of scenarios which may be run in order as a campaign, rules for creating your own characters, scenarios, equipment and weapons, background information on the Core Space universe, the Purge, Civilians, Gangster, Security Guards, Galactic Corporation and the Traders (these are who your players will be playing). Six different crews are detailed, the crews of the Black Maria, the Ion Hope, the Skylark, the Poseidon, the Yamato and the Cygnus. Each Trader team consists of four crew members of various races. The book is full colour throughout and it looks gorgeous.

To the right of here are the dashboards made of plastic, in which you can place your trader profile, weapons and equipment tokens they collect, a list of their special abilities and spaces for pegs to track their hit points, skill points and ammo expenditure. You get eight of these, which is enough for two full Trader crews. The profile and skills boards are laminated so you can record your advancements with a dry eraser pen (not included in the game).
I have been patiently waiting for this game for a long time and I can't wait to finish reading the rulebook, painting the figures and making the scenery. I can see me using the figures and scenery in other sci-fi games like my N.E.W. The Ace of Spades Campaign and my upcoming Judge Dredd campaign. Because the Purge are all robotic in appearance, I'll be using a lot of their figures in The Robot Wars supplement for Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD. Rather than pledge for the Standard set I pledged for the Titan set which netted me £281 worth of product for £120. That's a great deal! I leave you with a set of photos taken from the Battle Systems website that show just how cool this game looks.

Chaaaaarrrrgggeee!!!!!!

The crew of the Ion Hope - Roykirk, Arianna and Gak

The crew of the Black Maria - Renton, Jace and Lars

Get to the shuttle!

Shootout at Zed's

The Purge advance