I just played my first solo game with Blue, Yellow and Green (Chosen randomly) and I had some questions come up.

1) If I roll a 3-skull while attacking do I kill 3 GS or just 1?

2) If I use team A's MOVE + ACTIVATE card to swap with B, can I change the facing on B as well since he also moved?

3) I had a Swarm of like 7 on Lorenzo? from Blue and I used Counterstrike that turn, would that keep him alive as long as he kept rolling skulls? or is 7 just an instakill?

4) If your Space Marine is facing the wrong direction, he can still defend right? Just not use a support token to reroll.

If the answer to 1 is 1, then how on earth do you keep up with the spawning? If you had all three teams attack AND they were all facing the appropriate direction AND they all rolled skulls, you could kill 6 GS per turn. But the chances of all 3 of those conditions happening at once are slim and none. Even in the solo mode of spawns of 2/1 I had swarms of 5-7 by the 4th or 5th turn.

Mestrahd said:

1) You kill just a single genestealer. There are special abilities that may change that, but in general most marines kill 0 or 1 genestealer, depending on whether or not they get a skull.

2) No, only the team whose Move + Activate card is being used gets to change facing.

3) You still roll the die no matter how many genestealers are in the swarm, so if he rolled a lot of skulls in a row he could whittle them down or even wipe them out. Or he could get unlucky and die by rolling a 0, 4, or 5.

4) Correct. If you're flanked by the attacking genestealers, you can't spend support tokens, but you still make a normal defense roll.

Un-numbered question) Keeping up with the spawning can indeed be difficult, and is the primary source of dramatic tension in the game. Note however that there are a number of teams that have special attack abilities that will let you get ahead of the odds a bit. In just the Blue, Yellow, and Green you used in that game, there are 4 abilities for doing so. Blue has his defensive counter-strike and the ability to intimidate 'stealers back into the blip piles. Yellow has a special attack that kills 3 genestealers automatically (but is sometimes sacrificial). Green can sometimes get lucky and kill 3 Genestealers on one roll.

In addition, support tokens can be used to reroll attacks, and are definitely worth using to keep swarms from getting to 5 or more in size.

Also, just how difficult the game is depends a lot on what Event cards you draw in what order, so it's possible you may have experienced a harder-than-average run on the event deck. Shuffle well and try again.

Thanks for the answers! I could tell Claudio's charge would have been great, but the only chance he was in range of a swarm there was only 1 left after other attacks, so i had him attack normally. The next time he rolled a 2 against a swarm of 2 and died.

Frankly, I'm just thankful there is more than one skull on the die. From reading the instructions I thought there was only one before seeing the die.

Also, when moving the swarms, is there any particular order to do it? For example, sometimes if I were to flank A across the bottom into B, I could then move B up one slot and have just one swarm instead of 2. Obviously this is only advantageous if the resulting combo is 3 or less, but sometimes it could make a difference.

Mestrahd said:

Per page 22 of the rulebook, each individual genestealer card can only move once per round, regardless of whether that 1 move is up/down or flanking. So, effectively, it's simultaneous. In your example, A & B would _not_ combine, they'd be two different swarms.

EDIT: Had to revise my answer, and then unrevise it. I wasn't certain at first if I was correctly picturing the situation you were describing. I'm going to add a diagram.

1 | 2

3A | 4B

So we have four spaces, numbered 1 to 4. A is on Space 3, B is on Space 4. The event card indicates that A will flank, and B will move up.

If that's _not_ the situation you're describing, let me know and I'll take another stab at it.

If, as I assumed intially, that is the situation you're describing, the final position after movement would be:

1 | 2B

3 | 4A

Regardless of the order it happens in (other parts of the rules imply it's left to right, top to bottom, but it could just as easily be simultaneous), the cards from A will only move once. Whether or not B has/have already moved is irrelevant.

That was exactly the scenario I was thinking of. Thanks for clarification.

I'll have to try another game soon and see how it goes this time.