Chainsaw Warrior - blast and rip your way through the darkness (Review)
Transcript
Hey folks, welcome back to the dungeon dive. Daniel here. I hope you're doing well and if you're not, I hope you are soon. Okay, we have a retro review for you today and it has been a while since we've done a retro review. And in this episode, we are taking a look at Chainsaw Warrior, a solo board game from Games Workshop. And this was published in 1987, created by Steven Hand or Stefan Hand. Let's read a little bit about Chainsaw Warrior. It's the year 2032. A warp has opened up and the old municipal buildings in the heart of old Manhattan, and bizarre creatures are flooding through into our dimension. Going them on is darkness, a malevolent entity who intends dragging the city of New York back through the warp. Who intends dragging who intends to drag the city?
That's kind of a weird sentence there, but destroying it utterly. Many brave men died as sailing darkness stronghold before they remembered you in the past. You have done the special forces unit. You are a chainsaw warrior in the special forces unit. Uh yes. Uh, you have done the special forces unit many favors, but now you must come out of retirement to face the toughest challenge of your glorious career. Equipped with all the latest and high-tech armaments, you must battle your way into the very heart of darkness uh domain and defeat him within the hour or the city you love will be destroyed. Now, if this game was even half as good as this cover, we would be in for a great great treat. A superb game.
Unfortunately, the game is not even a quarter as good as its amazing cover. This game is simply okay, and I do not recommend chasing down this game, paying the collector's prices. It hovers around $75 now depending on the condition on eBay. But if you're looking for something like this game, this is kind of a simplified fighting fantasy game book in a game board setting. I do recommend to pick up um Escape the Dark Castle or Escape the Dark Sector. I think those will give you a very similar feel, but they are I in my opinion much better games. But Chainsaw Warrior can be some dumb fun. It's pretty much 99.9% luck and your chances of winning the game are pretty much determined before you even start the game as you roll up your character because if you roll up a terrible character, you just aren't going to win unless you have really, really good luck. Now, one of the things that I like about Chainsaw Warrior and with all of Games Workshop's games is the theme, is the atmosphere. I think this game does a great job of presenting itself. It looks cool. It's pretty easy to play. Uh, if you like the latest Judge Dread movie with Carl Urban where he's infiltrating this building in order to kill a big bad guy, then this
is kind of the game of that movie because you will be moving through a deck of cards and these cards are the darkness uh the darkness stronghold. It's kind of like a meth house. A meth house with the zombies and chaos agents and you are trying to defeat darkness and you need to do that within 60 minutes. Now, this isn't a real time game. You don't have a timer, but you do have a timer track. And that timer track starts at 60 minutes. And when it ticks down to zero, which is just offscreen, that is one of the ways to lose the game if you don't defeat darkness within that hour. Another way to lose the game is to lose all of your wounds or to become infected with poison and radiation uh thus killing your endurance. So we have all of these cards here and these cards represent the house that we are infiltrating. And in that house we will find things like zombies and chaos agents. We will find empty rooms and corridors. We will find various kinds of traps and all kinds of things to overcome. And so we can give that a quick shuffle there. Or just a couple of cuts. I've already shuffled it. These really thin old thin uh Games Workshop cards like the ones that were in uh Dungeon Quest are kind of hard to shuffle. And then we want to just kind of divide this deck in half. And we will start with deck one. And then we will take our darkness card. So darkness is who we are trying to defeat. And darkness will be in a room. And we will uh shuffle up darkness in the second
deck. So, we need to work through the first deck and then work through the second deck in order to find a darkness. And we can also find some wandering zombies within the house. And when we find one of those, we will draw one of our wandering zombie cards. Now, the art is pretty fantastic in this game. Let me take a look at the credits here so we can give the artist uh credit. And uh let's see where is that artist page here. So, yes. So, game design by Stephen Han or Stephan Hand. Uh, we have cover art by Brett Euans and Chris Baker. Card art by Dave Andrews and Colin Dixon. And then this also comes with a comic strip done by Brett Euans. And the comic strip is pretty cool. Uh, again, this is a lot like the 200 AD stuff. Um, I I wonder if Games Workshop was trying to get a license for Judge Dread and they couldn't and so they made this game cuz I know there was a Judge Dread uh 2008 AD board game. But uh yes, so script by Mark Gascoin based on an original idea by Stephven Hand uh highly inspired by 200 AD most likely and art by Brett Euans with lettering by Steve Potter. So yeah, really cool kind of retro style comic book. And I love this ad at the end. It's like that beach ad where the bully comes and kicks sand on the uh on the scrawny dude and then the scrawny dude beefs up and becomes like the chainsaw warrior in order to to become the hero of the beach. That
that's pretty cool. But yeah, nice nice little comic book. Always nice to see that kind of stuff in Games Workshop games. And Games Workshop always has cool rule books, too, I think. And here we do have some designer notes. And so you can read a little bit about the history of the game, how it's played, uh what kind of strategy strategy you should use, and we also have a good reference section. And you do kind of need to check the reference section multiple times until you learn uh the intricacies, the intricacies until you learn how the game plays. So the first thing that you do when you set up Chainsaw Warrior after you have created your house is you need to roll up your warrior. And you will do that. you will roll up your chainsaw warrior in a few ways here. So, the first thing we we need to do is we need to determine our endurance. And the endurance will let us know how much poison and radiation damage we can take. And so, we're going to roll 4d6 and total those up. And that's our endurance. Again, if you roll high, you might win. If you roll low, you will lose. So, this is pretty much right here is where the games uh your your victory or defeat will be determined. So our endurance is 6 5 11 12 13 14 15. So I will mark our 15 there. And then as we take radiation or poison damage from mutants and zombies, these will take up. And if these ever reach that 15, we have died. Okay. After we do that, we will roll two dice and
add six. And so this is how many wounds we can take before we die. Uh 4 + 6 is 10. So I will place our 10 there. And now that is our maximum number of wounds that can never be uh raised up. So now we will keep track of our wounds with this. I believe that's how that goes. One of these can't be raised. I'm pretty sure it's wounds. Actually, we can just keep track of this on there. And then we can tick down to zero. As we heal, we can go back up to our maximum of 10. That's how we'll do it there. And now we have we have to determine our handtoh hand skill. And we will roll one dice and add six. So this is how good we are at hand to hand combat. Excellent. That's a really good So yeah, we have a very good chance of winning because I just rolled that six. So 6 + 6 is 12. So our hand to hand bonus here is a 12.
We'll mark our handto hand with that token there. That is our strength when we get into handtohand combat. And then we will roll our reflexes. Roll one die and add a five and a nine. Very good. So our reflexes is here at a nine. Uh, reflexes are how we determine how we can respond to traps. And if we can get out a uh a ranged attack before a hand-to-h hand attack. So having a high reflexes is good because usually you will roll 2d6 and you want to roll your reflexes or under in order to overcome those challenges. Finally, we have our marksmanship. How good are we at range combat? A two. Not very good. We are at a minus one. So we really don't want to focus on ranged combat in this game.
Okay. The last thing we need to do actually we have two more things is we need to determine determine our skill. So what are we good at? And this will allow us to boost one of these. A four. We are good at strength. Okay. So let's see what strength. Add uh one to your handtohand rating to indicate that you are strong and powerful in close fighting. Okay. Okay, so our hand to hand rating is at 13. We are topped out. So we really want to focus with this character that we rolled. We want to focus on handtohand combat. And then the last thing we need to do is we need to kit ourselves out. And so we have over here we have a whole bunch of different items. We always start with this special item. And this special item is the laser lance. And the laser lance is the only thing that can kill darkness. And it can also be used to kill other things. But we really need to keep this in order to kill darkness. And this has three uses.
Now, this game comes with a whole bunch of tokens here that you can keep track of your uses. I usually just find it best to use a d6. We will place a d6 there with three uses. Now, we also have some clothing items, and these are different items that we can wear to give us uh some bonuses, usually some defense bonuses. We have our handtohand weapons. And so these are things that we can use with hand-tohand fighting. It's always good to try to find that chainsaw. It is kind of weird that the chainsaw warrior doesn't always start with its ch with his chainsaw uh equipped. There we have our devices. And so these are things like grenades and special things, lockpicks and special things that can help us overcome challenges. There's one very important item in this deck here and that is the rope launcher because there is a trap in here and that is the chasm. And if we find that and we don't have the rope launcher, we kind of have to start over. That way is completely blocked. So if you don't find the rope launcher at the beginning of the game, that can be a huge detriment. And then we also have a few different guns that we can take. And so we'll give those a shuffle up. And finally, we have some heavy weapons here. We'll give those a shuffle. These are things like rocket launchers and dynamite. And each one of these has a score associated with it.
And we will determine how many points we have to spend on our gear. And let's see to do that. Uh how do you do that here? So determine how many how much uh how many points we have to kit out our character. We roll a d6 and add two. Oh, three. Okay. So, we basically just lost the game with that roll. We have three points to spend. I really want to try to find that uh that handtoh hand. So, I'm going to take two hand to hand combat or hand toh hand items. And I guess we'll take one device hoping to find that rope. So, let's see. What do we find here? No, a lockpick. Uh locked doors have no effect. Okay. And now we have two handtoh hand weapons. We have a knife and a potson poison. A poison coated needle. Use once only.
Roll one die at the start of handtohand combat. Have the result. Rounding up. It takes this many rounds for your opponent to die. That's terrible. That's such a dumb weapon. And a knife. Uh zombies we can kill on an eight. Chaos agents at a nine. at a plus one handtoh hand rating or can be thrown. Okay. Yeah, we have basically lost the game because we have terrible weapons and we have a really bad device. Uh so and yeah, so this is the problem with this game is it's it's like entirely luck based and usually I like games with a lot of luck, you guys know. But uh this game can be you can enter this game feeling already defeated. And I already feel kind of defeated because just look if we had drawn that chainsaw. This chainsaw has unlimited uses and we get to just always add a plus three. So this is pretty much the only thing you want out of this deck. And if you don't get that, that's a real disappointment. And we don't have a gun. Luckily, we do have a pretty high handtohand rating, so maybe we can balance that out. Let's see. Let's see how it goes. Let's play a few sample turns. So, every time you tick down 30 seconds, when you get to 30 minutes, nighttime sets, and then you have to minus one from your hand-to-h hand combat. So, my hand tohand combat will go down to 12. There are some uh some uh
night vision goggles that you can get in order to avoid that penalty. And then now we do our exploration phase. And as we explore, we just draw one card and go through the deck. Very similar to uh escape the dark castle or escape the dark sector. There's no choice. There's no branching paths or anything like that. So we will draw our first card. It is a zombie in a corridor. That zombie has a hand-to-hand bonus of nine. And that E means that we cannot escape from this zombie. I believe that's what that means. Let me double check. Yes, opponents marked with the no escape icon means that we cannot escape with him. So, we need to have a fight with this zombie. The zombie will will roll 2d6 and add a nine. I will roll 2d6 and add a 13. Uh, basically, we are just looking at the difference. So, I will just add a plus four.
And I guess I should determine which dice are which first. We will use the yellow for the hero dice. All right. So, seven and then three and four plus four is eight. So, I defeated the zombie and we can continue to move on. Drawing the next card is a chaos chaos agent with a attack bonus of eight. Throwing knife expert. Before you do anything, roll a die on a five or six. He hits you for one wound and goes straight to hand-to-hand combat. So, I couldn't even use a gun on this chaos agent if I had one. So, if I roll a five or six, then he hits me with a knife, a three. They do not hit me with a knife. I go straight to hand-to-hand combat. And I'm just going to use my normal hand-to-hand combat. So, I have a 13, he has an eight. I will add a plus five. So, okay. So, we defeat the chaos agent. And now we can keep going. And now we find an empty. A wandering zombie appears on a roll of a six. Okay, so roll this. If I roll a six, I draw a wandering zombie. A four. Okay, nothing.
We can keep going. A trap. Unless you have a wire cutter, acid, knife, chainsaw, or laser lance. Roll one die and lose that many minutes. Check for the wandering zombies every minute. Okay, actually I should have I forgot to take down my time. I always forget to take down timers. I don't like timers in games because I always forget. So, that was one, two, three. One, two, three, and then four there. Okay, I do have a knife so I can get past the net. The net falls on me, but I'm able to cut myself out so we don't have to lose any more time. And check for a wandering uh zombie every minute. Okay, we don't need to do that. I can draw another corridor here, another trap. It's a cave-in. Test your reflexes. My reflexes are uh nine.
So, let's see. Uh, test your reflexes. If you fail, roll one dice and lose that many minutes. Okay, so I need to get a nine or lower and a four. We're good. Uh, let's see. Take one, wound two, roll a dime for every item of equipment on a six. It is broken in the fall. Okay, so let's roll for our our poisoncoated metal needle. It's good. Let's roll for our knife. It's good. Let's roll for our lockpick set. It's good. And I think our laser lancer can also get lost. In which case, I'm pretty sure we have to leave the building and lose a bunch of time to get another one. And a five. Okay, so nothing was damaged in that caven. Let's tick down time. Draw the next card. It is a rat pack. Uh gives uh give rabbit bites causing two wounds. Okay, so these guys will I bite you for two wounds.
They have a plus seven. I have a plus 13. So we'll just add six to my roll. And we decimated those rats. So we can keep moving on. Another trap. A wire. Unless you have a wire cutters. Roll one die and move the time track. That many boxes. Uh test for a wandering zombie every 30 seconds. Okay, I don't have wire cutters. So we need to move the time one die four. And we need to test for wandering zombies each time. So, one, no wandering zombie. Two, no wandering zombie. Three, no wandering zombie. Four, and we have a wandering zombie. So, now we need to have a fight with this wandering zombie who has a combat value of eight. Yeah, that's pretty much it. You work through this deck. Once this deck is done, then you start working through this deck. And you want to try to locate uh that darkness enemy. Where is darkness in here? Uh so yeah, that's pretty good. Darkness was only a few cards from the top. Again, this right here could also just kill you because darkness could be the last card and you wouldn't have enough time. So there is just a ton of luck. There's really there's almost zero strategy. The only real choice you ever have in this game is whether or not you want to fight or escape from an enemy or when to use your items. And that's pretty much it. None of the cards really give you a choice of
what to do, at least in a game like Escape the Dark Castle or Escape the Dark Sector. A lot of the times you would have a choice and you could think about at least a little bit about what you actually wanted to do. But, uh, chainsaw warrior is just roll d6 and see what happens. Sometimes that can be fun. The games are very fast to set up and put away. So, it's not like you're spending a whole heck of a lot of time setting something up for not a lot of game. So, I don't know. If you guys if you like the look, if you like the theme and all of the the cool art and stuff in the background of Chainsaw Warrior, you might want to check track this down if you have the disposable income. If you have 75 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, but if you have $75 burning a hole in your pocket, I would just choose Escape the Dark Castle because it also has awesome old school art. It has a ton of flavor, a ton of theme, and I think it's just a more fun game. But this is kind of a relic of the past. 1987, a very early uh solo board game from Games Workshop. There weren't a lot of solo games being made back in the early '8s, so it's kind of a novelty. Uh the way the game plays is still kind of a novelty, but I'm just not sure it's a good novelty. I've kept it in my collection for quite a while because it is small. It's in that small kind of original Talisman or or Dungeon Quest size box, so it doesn't take up a lot of room on my space. If the box was any bigger, I probably wouldn't reserve the
space for this, and I wouldn't have this in my collection any longer. But I have been wanting to do a video on Chainsaw Warrior for some time. There was an app version, but the people making the app they their uh timing for their rights expired as things always seem to do with game shop, Games Workshop when they license one of their things out to like uh uh Fantasy Flight Games or something like that and then that license expires and the games vanish and you can no longer get them. So, I don't know if you can find like a pirated copy of the video game. It's not for sale anymore. So, I don't think there's any problem with with trying to find a pirated copy. I don't even know if you can get pirated copies of mobile games. It was a mobile game. I played it a few times on my iPhone, and I had just as much fun with the mobile game as I did with the regular card game. Actually, probably more fun because there's like some cool animation and some cool sound effects.
But anyways, I hope you all enjoyed this brief look and overview and review of Chainsaw Warrior from Games Workshop. We will talk to you later. Bye-bye.