A friend of mine used to be in the Marines. He served overseas for a couple years. While there, they’d still go on regular training missions. One of them involved having to get from one place to another out in the desert. Well, unfortunately, the guy holding the compass was doing so right next to his weapon. Those that know how compasses work, they can be thrown off by a large piece of metal near them. You know… like a rifle… So the group got rather lost. Thankfully they all made it back safe, eventually. In Lost Patrol from Games Workshop, the Space Marine Scouts that have been sent out to find a downed Drop Pod have also gotten lost. Will they make it back alive?
The chaps over at GW were kind enough to send me a copy to check out and let you know about.
So remember that North is thataways and get ready for another TGN Unboxing. This time it’s Lost Patrol from Games Workshop.
Lost Patrol is another in the series of side games that GW has been putting out lately. It started with Betrayal at Calth. Then it moved on to Deathwatch: Overkill. Now we get Lost Patrol. The first thing to notice about this box is that it’s about half the size of the previous games. Due to a lower model count and smaller game tiles, the box doesn’t need to be as big as the previous games had.
Opening up the box we see inside. Things are placed nicely inside. Looks like we’ve got a couple of assembly guides, a couple bags of bases (I’m guessing I might have gotten an extra set of bases here). Then we’ve got the rulebook.
The rulebook is all of 6 pages. This is gonna be a pretty quick read when I get to going through it. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. Stay tuned for a full review when I have the time to assemble the figures and actually try out the game.
Underneath the rulebook are the boards that hold the hex tiles. The hexes are very well cut, as working to set them up to take a photo of the boards, all the hexes started falling out. Rather than fight them to try and put them back to try and look like they did coming out of the box, I just punched them all out. The tiles are single-sided. They’re not too glossy (as the boards in Deathwatch had been). They’ve got a pathway that goes down the middle of them. I suspect this is the trail that the Marines will be following along in the game.
After that we get to the sprues. There’s 4, total. 1 for the Marines and 3 for the Tyranids. And here’s something I’ve not seen from GW in a while: colored plastic. The Marines are in red and the Tyranids are in purple. That takes me back to the days getting purple Genestealers in Space Hulk. The three Tyranid sprues are identical. You get a total of 5 Marines, 12 Genestealers, and 6 “Infestation markers.” The plastic actually feels a bit more-stiff than I’m used to with Games Workshop’s latest releases. It doesn’t quite feel like something along the lines of what Mantic uses, but it is a bit more brittle. One of the sprues had snapped during shipment, and one of the Space Marine bolters had popped off the sprue. It wasn’t damaged, but it’s also something I’d not seen in a long time from GW.
You also get three green dice. They’re the “smaller” standard size (like the kind you get 36 of from Chessex in those packs). No special markings or anything like that on them. They’re just standard D6s.
And… that’s it. No extra token sheets. No piles of components. No giant rulebook. This game seems to be pretty straight-forward. Without speculating too much (as I mentioned, I’ve not read through the game’s rules yet), it seems that this game is meant to be a bit quicker to set up and play than the previous two releases. That might help differentiate between the games, as Deathwatch was also Marines vs. Tyranids. So we shall see.
The game’s been announced on the GW website. Retail price in the US is $60. So it’s certainly the lowest-cost of the new games. Pre-orders don’t start for a while yet (they’ll begin on June 11th). Stay tuned for a review in the coming weeks. And stay tuned for more unboxing and review articles here on TGN soon.