Review Summary: Gorgeous miniatures and an enjoyable light skirmish game, yet don't expect too much theme-wise.

Blurb from the publisher: 'Hall of Justice transmission incoming: high priority.

The fabric of reality has shattered.

Mega-City One is overrun with beings from the past and the present and the altogether alien, from space-faring mutants to raging barbarians. Buildings are phasing in and out of existence, and monstrous creatures terrorise the streets. Everywhere, death and destruction rule supreme- it's Helter Skelter.

Take control of the Justice Department's finest Judges, the technologically advanced Strontium Dogs, the scrappy irregulars under Nikolai Dante, or the mighty Sláine and his family, as they scramble to find the fragments of their own realities and crush anyone in their way.

Learn your team's strengths through their unique deck of action cards and leverage them to devastating effect. Outmanoeuvre your enemies or blast your way through them. Conserve your resources for the opportune moment or assault with reckless ferocity.

Do you have the focus and the grit to save your entire world?'

What you get: Your GBP 60 or equivalent will buy you Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter, the tactical skirmish base game that started the Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter game line. The game can accommodate from two to four players in just over 30 minutes.

Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter is a reimplementation of the well-known Wildlands. Unfortunately, I have never played that game. Thus, I cannot meaningfully compare the two.

In addition to the 12-page rulebook that can be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the box contains the following: a double-sided board, 20 ink-washed miniatures, 20 clip-on bases, 20 Character cards (5 per team), 120 Action cards, 4 Team cards, 4 Reference cards, 40 Map cards, and 91 plastic tokens.

Gameplay: In Helter Skelter each player controls a 5-member team from a different world of the 2000 AD comic. Teams are asymmetrical; three of them have five members, when the Sláine Mac Roth team has four... but then that latter team can see Sláine upgrade at some point in the game to a more powerful version of himself. Characters have a different number of health points (from 3 to 5). Some characters do not have special abilities (e.g. Mean Machine and Judge Giant from Dredd's team), other members however do. As an example, the remaining three judges (Dredd, Hershey, Anderson) all have high explosives, Sláine upgrades and attacks more ruthlessly if he delivers damage above a certain threshold, while Durnham Red heals her own damage when she deals damage to others.

The battle takes place in either Mega-City One's Hall of Justice, or in two of its city blocks and their exposed spaces. Both maps are divided into 40 different spaces. There are all kinds of obstacles like walls, cover, high ground, falls, line of sight and what have you.

At the beginning of the game, each player receives ten map cards. Five of them will determine the exact position each character will spawn on the map; each player decides that secretly.The remaining five will be passed on to the other player, who will use them to place his reality fragments on the map.

Each player starts with 7 action cards drawn from his team's custom deck. Each card shows which characters are authorized to act by using that card, and any precise action a particular character can undertake. Only one character can act by using a card. As an example, one of the Strontium Dogs' cards can only be used by Johnny Alpha and Durham Red. Either of them can use it for a Standard Action (Move, Climb, Collect Fragment - note however that the last two actions require the player to play more than one cards), while Johnny can also use it in order to Snipe (a combat action). Other combat actions include Melee, Smash, Shotgun, Explode, Psi, Fly, Rally, Heal, and Interrupt. Instead of a Combat Action, a card may indicate a Defensive Action for a particular character, namely Block, Deflect, Precog, and Cover.

A turn is as straightforward as they get. First, a player deploys a character according to the map location he allocated to him. Obviously enough, after all characters are deployed in the game, this step is skipped.

Then, a player can either deploy another character, or he can take one action, in any order, as many times as he wishes. He simply does this by discarding from one to three cards per action, as explained. When he feels satisfied with what he has achieved, he declares the end of his turn and draws three cards from his team's Action deck. A player can never hold more than seven cards in his hand.

There are no dice or other randomizers involved when attacking (e.g. through Melee, Smash, Shotgun, etc). That attack always succeeds, unless a player can play a valid defense in order to avoid it. As expected, different defenses apply to different attacks. You cannot block a bullet!

The game is won by the first player to gain five points. Points are gained either by claiming a reality fragment of your own colour, or by killing an opponent.

The strong points: Short; easy to understand, play and explain; straightforward. Only a couple of games in, and you will never have to consult the rulebook again. How many skirmish games can claim that? Yet, just because Helter Skelter is an easy game does not mean that it does not require thinking. That starts already by how you setup your characters to appear on the board and which cards you will give your opponent for him to place his fragments. Do you want to make all your characters appear in the game from the very beginning, or will you go for the five-round trickle, in order to understand what is going on and gain a tactical advantage?

Each game is guaranteed to be different than the previous one. The game doesn't do strategy, it does however situational tactics very well. Obvious piece of advice: always keep defenses, and do not overcommit, unless you are certain to win the game o that round. It is hard to win only through killing opponents or only through gaining fragments; you will have to go for both. Teams are slightly different to one another. As an example, four out of the five characters of Strontium Dogs have no special ability. This however is offset by the actions that their cards allow. My statistically insignificant number of playtests did not show any lack of balance between the teams. Each is as likely to win a game as it is to lose one. Play is fast-ish and engaging. There's the grinding of the teeth because you just happened to have (or didn't happen to have) that one action available, there's the take-that, the grudges, the trash-talking.

The game plays great in the four-player, free-for-all mode; it is less active as a two-player game, even though that doesn't make it bad in such a setup. I did not notice any king-making issues. It works great as a filler, and the stripped-down rules guarantee that younger audiences might embrace it eagerly. As an introduction to wargaming, it actually works.

The production values are i-n-c-r-e-d-I-b-l-e. Drool-worthy, ink-washed miniatures that you don't need to paint unless you want to show off; a gorgeous mounted map; very thick, durable cards with gorgeous artwork; custom made, fully covered plastic inserts that protect your minis firmly; and the attention to detail that I always crave: compartments deep and wide enough that can accommodate your cards after you sleeve them. Excellent job, Osprey Games!

The game is well-supported. We will examine the Dark Judges expansion shortly.

The weak points: The reference cards could have been better done. In an exception-based game like this one, knowing your deck and your own special abilities only is not adequate. In reality, each player should have had bigger reference cards that listed not only his powers and deck composition, but also those of his opponents.

I would have also preferred better pictographs. Some attacks cause 2 damage, others 1. Would it be too hard to depict it on the icon itself, in order to flatten out the learning curve?

If you are looking for a theme here, there literally isn't any. Even though these comic lines share the pages of 2000 AD, they have never been mixed like this before. A couple of mentions might have been made here or there about an event that happened in another line, and there is an arc where Johnny Alpha found his way into Dredd's World for a few progs. That's however it. In that sense, the game's title is woefully misleading. It is about Judge Dredd as much as it is about Sláine or Nikolai Dante. If it were honest, it would have been called '2000 AD: Helter Skelter', that is not however a name that people outside of the UK would have readily recognized. Still, I don't get the concept. Judges aside, why not include three characteristically Dredd factions like the Robots from the Call-Me-Kenneth storyline, or the mobster Apes, or the Angel Gang, alter the backstory behind gathering MacGuffin points, and thus present a skin that makes sense? This skin doesn't. Why does Mean Machine help the four Judges anyway?

Rules and theme do not mash meaningfully. High explosives is barely a hallmark of Judge Dredd, while Nikolai Dante doesn't get any special ability whatsoever, and we are talking about a superhuman with prehensile bioblades and regeneration. The game rules could have fit any conflict out there, like zombies versus pirates versus ninjas versus aliens. In short: no matter the beautiful minis, character portraits and materials, this is a 2000 AD-skinned game; not a Dredd-themed game.

For all its perfection the base game's box did not foresee one thing: additional space to insert the contents of the expansion. If you have it in your library and want to purchase the expansion, you will not be able to save space and store all materials in the same box unless you throw away its custom-made inserts. Nooooo!

I don't know who thought of the price, yet it needs a serious (and permanent) toning-down. Cool as the miniatures are, the game's gravitas does not justify the catalogue price tag. Out of sheer coincidence, the game was sold at a 30% discount at the time I submitted this review. I don't know whether that will last, it is however much closer to what the game should have cost in the first place.

Conclusion: Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter is a fun filler of a game. It is engaging yet not particularly demanding, plays fast, and can serve as either an intro to skirmish games or as a substitute for them if you don't have that much time at your disposal. Just don't expect meaningful Dredd, Sláine, Johnny Alpha, or Nikolai Dante action. It really is helter skelter theme-wise.

To find out more about Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter and Osprey Games take a look at https://ospreypublishing.com.

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