Review: Lost Patrol

This is NOT Space Hulk in the jungle!

Here’s another one of those Games Workshop board games that I was really keen on getting. Due to the fact that these games all need to be assembled it took a while before I actually got it together and had the chance to play.

The Premise

A drop ship with important surveillance files has crashed on the deadly jungle world of Moraz III. A squad of space marine scouts has been dispatched to retrieve the files and escape the planet with missing the drop ship.

Contents

In the box you get a squad of space marine scouts and 12 what I believe are purestrain genestealers. You also get some 6 siders and a bunch of jungle hexes about the same size as the ones from the Settler of Catan board game, and a bunch of genestealer infestation markers.

The quality of the miniatures is excellent and on par if they were bought separately.

Game Play

This is only a two player game. This is one of my biggest frustration with Games Workshops board games. While there are a few multiplayer games out there most seem to be of the two player variety. I suppose this can work well for people with limited player pools, but it does limit the amount of times I will bust this out.  

Ok rant over. On to the game itself. Holy shit this game is fast and deadly! It is virtually impossible for the space marine scouts to win. We played quite a few games and my buddy only came close to winning once, and even then he was down to one dude and it was unlikely he would be able to get pass the swarm of genestealers coming his way.

Each side has a certain number of action points they can spend moving and attacking. The jungle is created randomly with the exception of the drop pod which is always the last tile in the stack. As play continues the jungle can move cutting off space marines which is a neat part of the game. All in all everything is stacked against the space marine scouts.

The nice thing is that the game is so fast that you can switch back and forth between playing the genestealers and scouts.

The Verdict

I still really like this game, but I do think the rules need to be tweaked somehow. Otherwise after awhile the game becomes frustrating and pointless. Its one thing to make it hard for the scouts to win, but when you lose more games than you win (which will be almost all the time) what the point? From a purely miniatures perspective this box is worth buying just for the contents. Especially if you have both a space marine or genestealers army. My LGS told me that a lot of people just buy these boxed games for the minis inside because the price point is so good for what you get. With the exception of Blood Bowl, I think everything GW is putting out is useable in the 40K or AoS table top battles.