Game Review: Death Angel

By Jeremy Anderson

Type/Time/Players: Death Angel is a cooperative card game with a few tokens for one to six players. I can't speak to the quality of the solitaire play, but with the way the difficulty scaled I expect it is quite functional with fewer than the four of us who played. It takes about half an hour, plus the usual fifteen minutes if it's your first game. It's also pretty setup-intensive for a card game; around five minutes.

The Skinny: Each player represents a pair of space marines, but it's important to understand that all of the players are on the same team. People can try to be selfish and endeavor to only keep their own pair of space marines alive, but the game is designed so that sooner or later you need someone else's support fire to stay alive. The game is organized around the marines walking down the dirty, rusty hallways of a derelict ship, seeking artifacts from the old world. Genestealers, a race of feral evil aliens, come crawling out of the pipes and try to jump you. Each scenario is a little different, but in general you're trying to get somewhere and obtain something. Also, the mission is a failure if you all die.

The Good: The level to which the theme matches the game mechanics is impressive. Having a card game in which behaviors like "attack people from behind" or "explore stealthily" come across in a way that feels natural...It takes work. These designers made it happen, though. The marines, like those in Aliens movies, feel extremely tough and powerful right up until they die horribly. The rotating option mechanic (you can't use the same action two turns in a row, and you have three to choose from) means players have to support one another to get things done. And the way their initiative works keeps things pretty simple.

The Bad: Death Angel's biggest flaw is probably the fact that a player can, for reasons outside his control, be ejected from the game. If your marines both die, you're done. At that point, your only comfort is that your friends who let you die will probably be killed soon as well. Also, there's an event phase. While the event phase in general is really cool and keeps different copies of the same scenario fresh for players, it means that players - regardless how new they are to the game - have to make decisions about what will happen next. That tends to lag the game, and during that time the rest of the players can't do anything but twiddle their thumbs.

Conclusions: I've always said that a mark of a good game is one you can enjoy losing. In our game we got cocky, we got killed, and we had a lot of fun with the whole process. It's almost certainly a better game when the players are used to it, and (another mark of a good cooperative game) it almost certainly gives better odds to better players.