Since Space Hulk is all the rage again these days (or at least was two months ago), I took a look into my board game collection and sorted some stuff out. I stumbled over this little jewel here.
I'm not sure if and how this game was released outside of Germany, but the German version is quite hilarious if you take a closer look.
As a board game, Starquest was marketed to kids of course. In this game, one player would assume the role of the bad guy, controlling all the evil forces and up to three other players would play the "Galaxy Safe Guard".
From the looks of it, it was clearly some sort of
40k game, but with a lot of changes. Every
GSG player had 5 Marines, each with a different weapon, while the "evil" player too control of a combined force of Necrons, Genestealers, Orks, Gretchins, Chaos Marines and the fearsome Dreadnought.
It was played on a board consisting of 4 seperate pieces with walls and doors. I'm never going to play this game again, but I'm sure the board will prove quite usefull in the future.
Now, the funny part is, how the grimdark
40k setting was changed to make game safe for children to play. First of, all the enemies were summed up under the name of "Robotlings". Genestealers became "clones" and the Necrons became "Androids". The funniest change however was the one about the Space Marines. The iconography in the game was pretty obvious. They were Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and Ultramarines.
But now they've become the GALAXY SAFE GUARD, or
GSG for short (which
btw. is also the name for an anti-terror unit in Germany). They now were known as the
GSG Tigers, the
GSG Musketeers and the
GSG-19. But the best part were their weapons. Because the
GSG is a special unit formed by the human federation, who now lives in peace and prosperity, they
do not kill. That's why the use special non-lethal guns.
The "black hole gun" opens a portal which sucks the enemy robotlings in another dimension where they can't hurt them, while the "null-time cannon" froze time around them. The
GSG commanders also had special non-lethal weapons, like the "k.o.-sword".
The game itself used special attack dice and a "radar blip" system, not unlike Space Hulk. There was also a lot of gear and equipment. I never got a hold of the "Eldar expansion pack" though.