'Chainsaw Warrior' Review - A Solitary Pleasure Remade For Touch

Daniel Nye Griffiths, Contributor

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Zombies, chainsaws and a ticking clock dominate this remarkably faithful recreation of Games Workshops’ solo board game.

When I heard that Auroch Digital was working on a conversion of the Games Workshop board game Chainsaw Warrior, I confess to being more than professionally interested. Although best-known in the US for the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which has spawned a brood of games ranging from the peerless Dawn of War to the decidedly peerful Fire Warrior.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Games Workshop has long been the dominant force in specialist tabletop games retail, for better or worse, and launched the careers of Ian Livingstone, until recently life president of Eidos, and Lionhead cofounder Steve Jackson. Before it became a marketing powerhouse driven by the intense accessorisability  of Warhammer 40,000′s Space Marines and their increasingly picturesque enemies, Games Workshop offered a wide range of their own and third-party tabletop wargames and boardgames, and were often the only specialist gaming retailer in town – literally, before online shopping.

Chainsaw Warrior was one such, and an interesting experimental step, as it was designed purely for  a single player – in my case, a tween in a small British town without many friends interested in playing board games and parents who, on reflection, should maybe have paid a bit more attention to what I was reading and playing.

The game played out very much like patience, but with zombies. You, the titular Chainsaw Warrior, are a retired cyborg veteran in 2032, called back into action for one last job. A shadowy being from another dimension has taken over a New York tenement block, and will drag the city screaming into some sort of central casting Hell if not stopped. You are the only one who can et cetera.

It was actually a neat implementation of, in effect, a computerless roguelike. The player rolled the Chainsaw Warrior’s statistics, bought equipment (because apparently the military will happily fly our hero to New York, but cannot stretch to giving him more than a dice roll of points’ worth of equipment), and then explored the building by turning cards over. Each room might contain a zombie, a radioactive mutant, a chaos-worshipping zealot, a trap, a treasure trove of supplies, or nothing at all. The big bad lurks in the second deck, ensuring that the player does not turn him over on the second card-flip,, and will only meet him wounded, irradiated, envenomed, and low on ammo and time.

Die cut with a vengeance - the original board game

Chainsaw loser

Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that I have spent a long time talking about Chainsaw Warrrior, the 1987 Games Workshop board game, rather than Chainsaw Warrior, the 2013 videogaame by Auroch Digital for mobile devices.

This is because they are the same game. Compared with, say, Inkle Studio’s conversion of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, this is an incredibly faithful adaptation. The dice are virtual, but the equipment, the mechanics – even the gorgeous Brett Ewins card art, which exudes the biopunk stylings of the 80s incarnation of 2000AD, still going strong as Britain’s most successful sci-fi comic book. Barring a smaller surface area, the game plays out exactly as it does in its cardboard incarnation.

This is both good and bad. On the good side, Chainsaw Warrior  has held up pretty well. In a gaming culture where the roguelike is most certainly resurgent, this is a fascinating piece of game archaeology – a pre-PC roguelike.

On the other hand, it also brings over the limitations of the board game – conflicts are largely resolved by dice rolls, which slows process. Often, less powerful enemies are despatched effectively as a formality, but one still has to tap through the process – a corner that could have been painlessly cut. It also limits the deck to the physical cards included in the original game, which places an artificial limit on variety of opponents and random encounters.

Roll saving throw against BECOMING CUTLETS (the "it's" for "its" is apparently being corrected)

If you want the experience of playing a 1980s Games Workshop game, but in a mobile format, this iis absolutely the game you have been wauting for. It feels like a perfect game to be played on journeys – self-contained, with little need to remember preceding events – but battery drain is currently an issue; Auroch is working on updates.

A hard chain’s a-gonna fall

One intriguing survival from the social darwinist 80s is just how hard the game is. Auroch has given in to modernity by including easy and medium difficulty levels, which reduce the level of randomness in the character creation process, leading to a tougher, faster, more lethal and better-equipped warrior. The hard mode – which represents the setting of the original game – is gloriously infuriating.