Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Tannhäuser Tuesday - Operation Hinansho Detailed

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Operation Hinansho

This expansion contains:

Two-Sided Map :

Kitamon Research Base in Japan



Union Airplane Crash Site on Okinawa Island


The new maps have paths that follow a new basic rule - if the base of a character can fit in the space between two circles without touching them, then they are NOT adjacent.



 New Rules for the new map features and tokens.

Bunch of Tokens including those for new rules like Volatile Rubble, Locked Wooden Doors, and Locked Reinforced Doors. There are also the full Faction Tokens for the Shogunate - Objectives Tokens, Command Point Tokens and Flag Tokens. The remaining tokens are for Story Mode, and Covert and Gate tokens.

New Circle Types:

Locked Door
Sniper Circle
Covert Circle
Volatile Circle

There are a number of new circle types in this expansion.

Locked Doors
When a Locked Door token is on the appropriate circle, the door is locked and characters may not move into that circle.  The Locked Door tokens contains 2 skill icons; green and red. If a character adjacent to the locked door has a skill matching the green icon, they can spend one movement point to open the door. If they do not have that  skill, the door is unlocked by using 3 movement points.Anyone next to the door can spend one movement point to close it and it is locked again. Any character adjacent to the locked door with a matching skill to the red icon may try to smash the door, permanently destroying it. Reinforced doors require the Mechanic skill and Wooden doors the Athletics skill.





Covert Circles and Tokens
Now they're getting tricky. Covert circles can target Sniper circles if their icons match in color. They may also target characters in circles that match the color of the covert targeting icon (green in the example picture. Additionally, the character inside the covert circle can be targeted by anyone they can target, BUT… only Natural 10's count as hits when attacking the character in the Covert circle.

Just to make it more fun, grenades thrown from a Covert circle and using the Covert ability don't bounce. Grenades thrown at a Covert circle follow the normal rules.

There are also Covert Tokens that can be placed in certain scenarios.




Volatile Circle and Volatile Rubble
Before they are activated, characters pass through these circles normally. Once activated, all characters that share the volatile path take three automatic hits and a volatile rubble token is placed in the circle. Any character that passes through this rubble takes 3 automatic attack successes (in addition to the movement penalty of the rubble.)




Gate Tokens
You can now connect two maps together using these new tokens. Put two maps next to each other and place a couple of these tokens down to bridge the gap between the two maps.

I think you could also use these to connect the stair cases on the original maps to allow an upstairs and downstairs to be easily identified…



The rest of the rule book is not included, but the Gate Token section mentions you can play these big double maps with "Large Teams" - 5 Heroes and 4 Troops, or with 4 teams.


The Cost
I am not sure why FFG did not release the Shogunate items as one big box set like the Matriarchy, but it probably has to do with price.

$29.95 - Operation Hinansho
$12.95 - Iroh
$12.95 - Mizu
$12.95 - Itami
$19.95 - Troops
$85.85 - Total - I don't think the included Equipment Cards raise the price by $25.90 over the Novgorod set which is also a full Faction. Being able to buy them piecemeal also spreads the payment out into manageable chunks, instead of the one big hit.

$59.95 - Operation Novgorod
$69.95 - Base Game


Operation Hinansho and the Matriarchy Natalya pack are currently listed as being 'On the boat' which typically means 4 to 6 weeks.

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