Order stacks and the guy who won't stop counting cards

Somebody left this on the shelf at the after-shift bar two Christmases ago and it took me a month to admit I wanted to buy my own copy. Forbidden Stars is Fantasy Flight’s 2015 area-control game, four Warhammer 40K factions, Space Marines, Eldar, Orks, Chaos, fighting over a warp-storm map that reshuffles itself every round so the routes in and out never sit still. Designers are Samuel Bailey, James Kniffen and Corey Konieczka, and it plays 2 to 4, though the box says 120 to 180 minutes and I have never once seen that number hold up.

The order stack is the part that hooked me. First in, last out, you plan your whole turn starting from the last action and working backward, and an opponent can place an order right on top of yours just to delay your resolution and blow up the sequence you built. That tension, figuring out what your opponent wants before they’ve shown it, is the best thing in the box. Combat is its own animal, dice plus cards, morale instead of straight elimination, and the way cards remain in play for three rounds of a fight adds a real layer to it, though it also means a single scrap can run long if you’ve got an AP-prone player at the table who could greatly increase that already generous runtime just deciding which card to commit.

When you’re not in the fight, you sit there doing nothing while other factions fight it out. This is not a Tuesday game. I don’t pull it out unless I know I’ve got a full night and everybody’s already fed, because I dread dealing with the setup and the fiddliness of four factions’ worth of units and cards before a single order gets placed. FFG at least splits the rules into a learn-to-play book and a separate reference guide, which makes learning the game easier and more accessible, and I appreciate that more every time I teach a new hire at 1am. Run it at three, though, and watch the table turn into a kingmaker scenario fast, worse than what you get at two or a full four.

Four factions, wildly different playstyles, and I still haven’t gotten sick of any of them two years in. It’s not a light night, and it punishes the table if somebody stalls on a battle, but it earns the time it takes. Still my pick when the crew wants something with teeth.