The rules
Joint Ops: Terror On Devlan mission pack
This box features a new narrative mission pack, featuring nine PvE missions that can be played using either cooperative or solo gameplay. All of them involve the Red Terror and a handful of its Termagants and Ripper Swarm friends. While you can randomly select one and hop into a game, where this pack really shines is the campaign. Starting with Mission 01: The Hunt Begins, whether or not you win or lose determines your next step along the campaign path. It gets really exciting after the fourth mission, where the paths start to aggressively diverge and set you on the way to the different outcomes, ranging from Glorious Campaign Victory, all the way down to a Spirited Campaign Defeat. As always with Joint Ops, you can tweak the number of NPOs or the number of wounds they start with to increase the difficulty as necessary.
One interesting mechanic is the NPO activation cards, which come in a deck of 13. Whenever an NPO activates, draw a card, and the table in each mission description will tell you what to do. I love this because it could get really swingy (think multiple Red Terror activations in a row), but also because it takes some of the decision-making out of the players' hands. In the past, it has sometimes been hard to make all of the decisions for the NPOs. This will help alleviate some of that and move the game along faster, with more randomness. Another nice touch is that you can easily substitute this deck with a standard set of playing cards, using all the cards from one suit. All you really need is 13 numbered cards!
When I play this campaign, I hope I lose the right combination of games to end up at Mission 09: Last Stand. Without spoiling too much, the battle will only end once your team is completely incapacitated, and “winning” is calculated by how long you can survive. As it says on the page, “The deeds of your kill team will not be remembered” – how grimdark is that?!
