Customer Reviews

Chaos in the Old World

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This game will ruin your game collection. All your other games will gather dust because Chaos in the Old World (COW) will be the only game that 3-4 people will beg to play.

COW is a game that has beautiful parity with diverse options to victory. Each player plays an evil god bent on destroying the world. The rules are simple. You summon creatures, play chaos cards, fight by rolling dice, then calculate points. Whoever has the most points wins.

How's that fun?

COW's master stroke is that each god adds its own flavor for playing the game. For instance, if you play Khorne, you are the blood god and relish the chance to attack other players much as you can. You get chaos cards that aid your bloodlust. By killing figures, Khorne also gains upgraded abilities through the game. Other players tend to flee from his reign of terror. The three other gods, Tzeentch, Nurgle, and Slaanesh, are much more subtle. For instance, each respective god can teleport, overwhelm, or control other players' figures. No god will ever play the same as the other 3. By playing as your god should, you stand an excellent chance to win.

Never does COW feel like playing solitaire. Each player is constantly watching the moves of the others and whispering to their fellow players in the hopes of creating fleeting alliances. The tension built during the game is astonishing as games are won typically by thin margins.

Chaos in the Old World's tension, variation, art, theme, and balance will have you and your friends lusting for more plays than other games. I cannot recommend COW highly enough.

Chaos in the Old World is a fast paced interesting spin on the world conquest genre set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It is for 3-4 players, but ideally 4 players as the balance issues crop up a lot with only three. Each player takes on the role of one of the gods of chaos who is intent on corrupting the world, and the game has a phantom fifth player which is the world and all its pitiful mortal denizens who are trying to survive and stave off the apocalypse.

Pros:

-Short: It's a relatively short game, taking 2-3 hours to finish (about 3 hours for your first game). This is great if you don't have endless time to kill and are petrified of more daunting wargames like Axis & Allies or Twilight Imperium which could suck up a whole day.

-Immersion: The flavor text and personality for each chaos god is excellent. Each chaos god has unique winning conditions and powers that fit his idiom. For example Nurgle plays a Rain of Pus card on a battle to gain defense. You have to alter your strategy to fit your particular character's strengths if you want to win.

-Pick up and play: The game mechanics are pretty easy to pick up and play compared to many other army combat board games; making it easier to bring this up with casual gamers who are intimidated by giant rulebooks and stacks of chits.

-Randomness: Good and bad. I like the randomness of Old World card events, but they tend to cripple certain players if they fall just right and sometimes they never recover. It does make every game unique, but that is not always a good thing especially when you win or lose at the whim of fate. I like how Slannesh's cards allow you to take over other players' units temporarily and Tzneetch can teleport units around-- they are both very fun mechanics that also fit the chaos gods' personalities.

-Figures: The plastic figures for units are great and a welcome change from cardboard chits (of which there are plenty in this game). The figures are also unique for each god's higher cost followers and are very detailed.


Cons:

-Balance: Because the chaos gods are each unique there is always the question of game balance. There are two ways to win: get 50 Victory Points or advance your Threat Wheel (or the game ends when you ruin too much of the world and compare Victory Points, or Old World cards run out and the game wins). The problem is that each player's Threat Wheel advances with different conditions, some of which are easier than others, and some players have to advance it more to win. Nurgle really only can win by Victory Points and Khorne can only win by advancing his Threat Wheel. The other two gods are a toss up, but I have found that the Threat Wheel advancement is easier in general for both.
My first game I played Khorne in a 3 player game and it was ridiculously easy to win. Khorne's units are just much better than everyone else's and as you upgrade them it gets even easier. I don't like that only Khorne wins by attacking other players: everyone else is avoiding combat and trying to complete their own agendas while Khorne is picking fights.
The next game I played Tzneetch and we kept Khorne out because he seemed unbalanced. The problem was that the Old World cards that came up this game made Tzneetch's winning conditions much easier and through no fault of my own I was winning again. With four players it evens out a bit, but mostly because there are more people to gang up on the winning player when it unbalances.

-Lack of variety of cards: The power cards for each chaos god repeat a lot. The powers there are nice, but I would have appreciated a more varied deck. It stifles replayability.

-The Map: For a Warhammer game it has a pretty boring map. It is the Old World, but the regions are all generic with a number rating and whether they are populous or not. The map never changes and many random events always target the same map areas. Your units don't actually move: they just get summoned into a space adjacent to an area you already have a unit. When you run out of units you have to summon them out of other areas (paying the same cost as if you summoned them from scratch). So it really doesn't feel like you're moving around in a medieval world as much as plopping demons down on a cosmic chessboard.

-Too many cardboard chits with no place to put them all: BYOPB (bring your own plastic baggies).


So a lot of nit-picking criticisms but overall I like Chaos in the Old World. If you're looking for a light wargame with a lot of Warhammer personality that can be finished in a night then this is a fun choice. I wouldn't play this every day though as the strategies will get old. You will find that you like one chaos god's powers and winning conditions more than the others', and everyone might end up fighting to play one of them unless you assign roles randomly.

I've been a fan of Fantasy Flight Games for awhile now but they have come out with something special in this title.

Pros: A Fast, Fun, Easy, Dynamic, Game.
Cons: Really needs 4 players to achieve balance, somewhat pricey for a board game but not unreasonable for what you get.

To start, the game is made from a traditional hard cardboard fold up style playing surface that is thick and durable. The pieces are plastic miniatures similar to Axis and Allies or Twilight Imperium. One drawback is the thin plastic used for the staff on the Cultist pieces breaks very easily but all the other pieces are very sturdy.

The rules are simple to explain and game play is easily learned with about 20 minutes of explanation and after one game turn is well understood. The simplicity of the rules system does not detract from the game however as it is similar to chess in minutes to learn lifetime to master. Play balance is such that, of the four games I've played to date, all of them were decided in the very last turn with only a few points separating first from second.

With four new players expect to play for about three and a half hours and once everyone is familiar with game play you could crack out a full game in a little over two. Setup is very fast taking maybe 5 minutes.

In the heart of the game each player takes on a demon faction vying for dominance of a mid-evil world with the one who corrupts the most locations or advances the fastest winning, however if time runs out all can lose. What makes this game very fun to play is the random event cards that shift the balance of power from one faction to another forcing players to come up with new strategies to win each time they play. This randomness also means that you will never play the same game twice. There is quite a bit of strategy for a game with such a simple play system. For people who like games with alliances and diplomacy this isn't the game for you, as diplomacy in Chaos in the old world generally is expressed as "what are you planning to do there?" once a move has been made and alliances are non existent.

Overall I would highly recommend this game for its ease of play, fun and its potential to introduce people to nontraditional (monopoly) style gaming.

On the eve of my friend and colleague's departure from NYC, he visited me at 9PM to say his goodbyes. When he arrived a mutual friend and I were wrapping up our first sloppy game of Horus Heresy (I'd like to talk about that one some other time...), and though it was getting late, we decided that-having played Eric Lang's Chaos in the Old World so many times in the past months and having had so much fun-it was only right to squeeze in a final game.

Chaos had served as a fixture in our gaming life for the past several months, and will likely continue to do so, but this was a particularly special game for us, because it was the last we'd play together, and we'd each grown skilled enough at the game to be strategic, adaptable, and expressive. We'd spoken about the game for hours on end, deliberating the strengths and weaknesses of the four unique gods, and eventually, having seen each god resolutely conquer the old world in rather poetic fashion, knew that any player could win if played properly. We knew that the game was best balanced when played by four players, but that such games could be hectic and lesser-skilled players were likelier to take a seat. We also knew that games played with three good players could be startlingly clear and fascinating to watch unfold.

When we played the first time, it took us 2-2.5 hours to complete, including set-up, play, and striking the game to the box on completion. But we knew the game well, and now no chit or piece gave us pause--we could efficiently set up the board and be drawing our first Old World card in ten minutes, playing the game quickly but thoughtfully in a little over an hour, and striking the pieces in another ten. That is, it took us about half the time to play the game now, and yet the game was played with as much precision as it had ever been.

No game of Chaos is the same, but every game can be close. By the middle of play the game turned from an open, slower game to a mad race for victory points. While one of us had taken an early lead, the others had struggled to catch up, and by the final round, in which we knew victory or defeat was inevitable, it was possible for any of us to achieve a victory point goal. In that final round there were some excellent moves--the two point leaders trying aggressively to outscore the other, the trailing third looking for some hat trick to stop them both and win for himself. By game's end each of us had scored enough victory points to qualify to win, but the early momentum of the Chaos God Nurgle eked out one more point than Khorne to become the victor.

We discussed the game afterward (as we always did), each of us revealing interesting aspects of the ending round, and realizing how desperate a battle it was, and once the game was safely boxed away we said our goodbyes. It was nothing sentimental, but it was a tad bitter. It was sad to see a good player of the game go because a good player of the game made it that much better.

These experiences are universal to very good board games, I think. I long for my old chess partners, and still remember their various tactics to win and odd behaviors while they played, and remember walking away from the board wishing I was not, and hoping soon for another game. It is special that Chaos is a game that can evoke these emotions, and can continue to challenge and enhance the player willing to learn it.

For the small amount of patience it takes to overcome the obstacles the game presents in its first few rounds for beginning players, there is a far greater reward to follow, and it is without hesitation that I recommend this game to both board game enthusiasts and those with the most fleeting interest in games. Chaos in the Old World is a great and memorable game, and essential to even the smallest collections.

(Prev. pub'd on Board Game Geek dot Com)

Chaos of the Old World is a Warhammer-themed game that isn't really Warhammer-oriented, otherwise.

It's a good game, but the one major downside is that, without four players, you have to figure out ways to balance the game. Probably the most logical way (I have yet to try this) is simply remove Khorne from the pool of possible characters.

The game is reasonably easy to learn coming out of the gate, and it's wonderful for playing with four people.

I very much enjoyed this game. Another downside of the game, though, is that when punching the pieces out, the layered-cardboard did not prove to be very durable. Several of the punched-out pogs immediately wanted to start peeling (like layered cardboard frequently does). Additionally, the box was poorly designed to put the pieces back in the box, so it's hard to fit everything. The game doesn't come with enough plastic bags to store the pieces (I don't understand why game makers always forget this VERY IMPORTANT detail), so you'll need to get some additional zip-lock bags for your copy of the game. Lastly, in regards to the physical design of the game, one type of piece, called "Acolytes" have a little tab that sticks up. Pretty much all of my acolytes came with that tab bent down, and it was really irritating, because I know eventually the little tabs will break off with enough use.

Chaos in the Old World is flat out a great game. There is a ton of strategy and tactics packed in this box. Four different powers, with different strengths and goals via for victory in a fantasy setting. The game is tense because you are constantly messing with the other players, trying to meet your objectives, or arguing about who should should stop whom. I played a friend's copy one time and had to have it.

This is my new favorite game and I'm dying to play it again.

It's good and complex. The roles of the different gods is a nice twist. You have to play as them and not outside of their play style and expect to win.

The rules are pretty intense (first time with a REAL board game) but worth it, in the end. Great community to be involved in. Fantasy Flight Games continues to amaze!

My friends and I would rate this a 9/10.

CitOW takes a little getting used to, play wise. The game mechanics are fairly unique and each chaos god/player has specific strengths and weakness to get used to. That said, the over all experienced is quite balanced and, for long time GW players, it's a great addition. Extra points for awesome game pieces!

A pretty good strategy board game. Four players each take on the role of an evil god trying to take over the world while competing with the other evil gods.

The biggest strengths of the game are also its biggest weakness. Each god plays unique and has their own special strategy for success. On the flipside, it's hard to perfectly balance 4 totally different playstyles. At the level of beginner play, one god is overpowered. At advanced levels of play, another god has an advantage.

Another thing about the game is the rigid number of players allowed. You pretty much need 4 to play, no more no less. All players also need to be around the same skill level. Having one new player not only ensures he won't win, but that a god he would normally counter will be able to run around unchecked.

Buy it if you have exactly 4 people to play and learn it all at the same time together.

If you are a Warhammer fan, then this is for you. Those wo may not be as familar with the Warhammer games and books will be a bit put off by the strangeness of the subject matter. But if Crush,Kill,Destroy and Corruption is your thing, then get your copy promptly