Hi all,

I'm new to Death Angel, having only completed six games so far (won one), mostly in single-player with one epic, hilarious attempt at six player (game over man, game over).

The first couple of times I made a couple of rule errors. I missused support tokens, for instance (I completely forgot about facing). I also, on my very first playthrough did something that changes the game in quite a noticeable way.

Instead of spawning stealers then moving swarms correctly, I treated the arriving stealers as a seperate swarm that wouldn't move on their first turn.

In essence switched their action order from SPAWN/MOVE to MOVE/SPAWN. I know, the rules (and the order of symbols on the cards) clearly state otherwise but it made dramatic sense to me.

Terrain is where Stealers spawn, and if you don't wipe them out in the first combat, they get amongst you and start moving around the formation. It gives the marines a slight advantage in that you can 'set' a guy on spawn points, you also get more 'smaller' swarms and less chance of a super-column of death (although they still happen).

Anyway, I love the game and have played it correctly ever since, but I'm tempted to try the the wrong way again for a bit of variation.

Has anyone else ever done this? I'd be interested to hear what more experienced players made of the change.

I've never tried that. On the one hand it will be easier to predict where a large swarm will be, making it a bit easier to position marines like Gideon or Claudio.

On the other hand, I think anything which prevents swarms from merging and makes them split up will make things tougher. This seems counter intuitive at first, but there are actually many ways to handle one large swarm. (Power Field, Block, Defensive Stance, Flame Attack, or just position expendable marines in front of it until you can get a handle on things). Lots of midsize swarms on the other hand will really wear you down. The first stealer moves you from no chance of death to 2/6, whereas each stealer after that just adds 1/6 chance. It's also hard to position your support tokens and defensive abilities because you never know which marines will roll lucky and which are going to roll a zero.