Having epicked it out to the max at Britcon this weekend we took a break from our regular Tuesday night six-millimetring and sat down with a copy of Fantasy Flight‘s Chaos in the Old World.
Each player plays on of the four major Chaos Gods, and attempts to corrupt the Old World before the other Gods do, or the Old World itself defeats you. I bagsied Tzeentch (of course).
Let’s start with the plus sides.
All the players are constantly involved, fighting each other, ravaging the various Warhammer territories and marshalling their followers. There’s no downtime, and there’s a lot of infighting and bickering between players as they try to spoil each other’s plans and chew up their rivals’ cultists and daemons. Additionally, there is room to collaborate with the other players, so it feels very much like you’re part of the Chaos pantheon.
Secondly, the four gods play very differently.
Now the downsides. Downsides that led us to drink and despair.
The rules language is awful. What you’re meant to do seems to be implied rather than clearly stated. The rules pamphlet is best likened to a tax return form you only seem to have half the required sections for. By way of example one of the six phases is the “Corruption Phase” which is subdivided into the “Domination Step” and the “Corruption Step” – so there’s confusion between the similarly-named “Corruption Phase” and the “Corruption Step”. We were really struggling to remember the affects of all twelve different types of card counters. I suppose you could argue the game’s an accurate representation of Chaos as a confusing jumbled mess of ever-shifting concepts and terms.
And the four Gods each play very differently. They each operate with a different set of rules, making it difficult to figure out what’s actually going on strategy-wise. There’re so many oddball cards and effects it’s hard to play tactically let alone strategically without having played all four Gods (or at least having a familiarity with all the 149 cards).
Overall, characterful on account of its complexity. We were left frustrated that it wasn’t easier to pick up. It’ll be another few months before we wheel it out again for a second session.
