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I had bought the BaC game a few months back and have been slowly working on the models (note the word "slowly"). We just played the first scenario and I was curious to compare our experiences with others to see what folks think.

POSITIVES
- Love the unique dice
- Plays quick
- Command cards add a fun element to play
- Weapon critical effects add quick and useful effects to spice up game play.

NEGATIVES
- Luck is huge; command cards can vastly augment the randomness for one side or another and aren't always useful (We'll be drawing 2 card initially and keeping 1 in future games)
- Allocation of the wound pool rules is completely unfair; a better mechanic would seem to roll ALL armor rolls before allocating hits
- Meltaguns are far too good without some sort of balancing factor

I should point out that for the first scenario, I won as the ultramarine player handily - essentially the game was over at the end of the 3rd turn; my son lost all but one of his Word Bearers (who did manage to escape); I only lost one Ultramarine (to close combat). I used only 2 command cards, but their effects were devastating - extra ranged activation in the 1st turn, frag grenade in the 2nd. My son didn't have a single command card that helped him in the game. Clearly by the end, he was so frustrated at the results that it will be difficult to get him back to the table for another game (clearly a bad result for a $100+ board game).

Overall, I think the game has some great ideas, but with many things GW, has flawed execution. Of course, that was only the first game and our first one at that (we've both been in a 40K league, but that was our first game of Calth), so if we get some other games in (I dread when the Dreadnought shows up...), I may change my mind. Again, I'm curious what others have experienced with this game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Nobody else interested in this game or discussing it?

I appreciate the brief review. I've been wondering whether people are actually playing the game or just using the minis as stepping stones into HH.

From the sounds of it, it looks too random. With a massive win/loss margin.

Would some house rules help? Like the wound allocation thing?

The problem with allocating after rolling saves is when you have a unit of a Terminator and a Tactical, which is possible for the UM. If you don't know who got hit, whose armour value are you using?

I have found the game to be typical of GW, balanced through randomness. The dice can be extremely swingy. I've tried most of the missions so far and it's been pretty even for us so far, with the luck swinging wildly either way. A couple had last second long shot attempts that paid off and scored a victory for the side that had been losing badly up until then. It's fun enough that we'll probably play all the missions eventually, but not so much that we'd drag it out to replay or play it over normal 40k.

I agree, from the brief play randomness seems to play too huge a factor. I don't mind a little randomness so that the scenarios can be played many times over and still be interesting, but I think GW has used randomness instead of putting more effort into tactical balance.

As for the terminator/tac marine issue, you do select the target, so you'd still roll all the armor dice (8 I think), then assign any left over damage to the tac, and any spill-over to the termi.
It would, however favor keeping everybody in a group - 3 tac marines would roll 6 dice to defend, and attack with 6 dice. You'd also have to figure out how to handle meltaguns ( reduce total armor rolled by one figure's armor?).
It might be easier in the end to go to figure by figure shooting, but you'd lose a lot of the game's speed and bolted vs Bolger would take forever to take marines down