Friday, 30 September 2011

Chaos in the Old World - A retrospective

Chaos in the old world is an amazing game. Simply brilliant in design and execution.

The concept? It's the the Warhammer fantasy world and the players are the four ruinous powers of Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch and Slannesh hell bent on corrupting everyone and driving them to destruction.

The only thing stopping you from corrupting everyone is the forces of the other players (And some resistance from the board itself)

Each faction plays differently and they really bring out the flavour of the four chaos gods in the play style.

Here are my pieces from Chaos in the Old World, all painted thematically.





Khorne is all about the killing. How do you win? You chop up every other player forces. Khorne doesn't care who hes fighting as long as hes fighting. Khorne has lots of bloodletters and the beastly bloodthirster, but is very short on cultists. Khornes on shot at winning is to get stuck in early and often and attack the leader where possible. Best laid plans get ruined when the bloodthirster rocks in and kills a stack of cultists.



Nurgle plays differently. He's all about corrupting the biggest population sites in the smallest amount of time. Nurgle can deploy faster than the other powers as it's plaguebearers are very cheap to play. Left alone, nurgle can destroy a region in a turn or two and really needs to be challenged directly to prevent it running away with a win.


Tzeentch is probably the most fun power to play. Why? Because of all the wizzo magic cards and sneaky tricks Tzeentch can pull. Repositioning forces, teleporting around the board, ruining eveyones day by just showing up and some pretty amazing spells. Not a super strong power, but one that used well can easily win just by being at the right places at the right time.



Slannesh has always been my favorite chaos god. When offered a choice between an eternal life between

  1. Murder, bloodletting and war
  2. Rotting and pesitilence
  3. Magic and mutation
  4. Debauchery and hedonism
I know which one I'm gonna choose.

Slannesh plays defensively and insidiously. It's units are hard to kill and Slannesh can prevent fights from occuring and corrupt other peoples cultists. Slannesh can block Khorne from rampaging quite well at times, and can sneak cultists into other peoples territories.

All this amounts to Slannesh being an opportunist, like Tzeentch but with a different flavour. Tzeentch allows violent dramatic changes on the board while Slannesh is just sneakier.

I really recommend this game, the models are pretty ordinary, and the banners the cultists have are incredibly flimsy, but the game is very solid.

Play with all 4 powers though, missing one out kills the flavour of the game.

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