Forbidden Stars
Program hidden orders, build armies and fleets, upgrade your faction and fight across a shifting Warhammer 40,000 star cluster in Fantasy Flight Games’ acclaimed but long-out-of-print strategy game.
Forbidden Stars is a Warhammer 40,000 strategy game designed by Samuel W. Bailey, James Kniffen and Corey Konieczka. Two to four players control asymmetric factions competing for objective worlds across the Herakon Cluster.
The game remains unusually prominent for a title that has been unavailable at normal retail for years. BoardGameGeek currently shows roughly 10,000 ratings, an average near 8.0 and an overall rank around #158. Interest has also risen again because 2026’s Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins is officially described as an enhanced reimplementation of Forbidden Stars.
Why it stands out
The defining mechanism is not simply area control. Players program orders face down into shared system stacks. If several factions target the same system, those orders pile on top of one another and must later be resolved from the top down, turning planning into a spatial bluffing puzzle.
Why this is still a strong organic-search title
Forbidden Stars combines three durable search drivers: a major Warhammer 40,000 licence, strong hobby reputation and scarcity caused by its official discontinuation.
Search intent includes rules, order tokens, combat, factions, objective victory, best player count, why it is out of print, whether a reprint is coming, used-copy buying questions, Old Ones Origins comparisons and games similar to Forbidden Stars.
Game at a Glance
Program Orders
Place four facedown orders into systems, often stacking them above or below an opponent’s plans.
Build & Upgrade
Deploy forces, construct factories and defenses, and improve combat cards and order abilities.
Fight for Worlds
Use faction units, dice, combat cards and reinforcement assets in ground and space battles.
Claim Objectives
Control worlds containing your faction’s objective tokens and collect enough to win.
How Forbidden Stars works
Every round has three broad phases: Planning, Operations and Refresh.
During Planning, players alternate placing facedown order tokens into systems on the modular map. During Operations, those orders are revealed and resolved. During Refresh, players collect objectives and income, rally routed units, resolve events and move Warp Storms.
The strategic challenge is that the same system can contain orders from several players. You may know what you planned there, but an opponent can place another order on top and change which action resolves first.
Why setup already contains strategy
The board is built from modular system tiles rather than one fixed map.
Each player places systems and distributes opponents’ objective tokens onto worlds during setup. That means the geography of victory changes from game to game.
You are therefore making strategic decisions before the first order token appears: where are your own forces concentrated, where are enemy objectives likely to draw them, and which routes might later be cut off by Warp Storms?
The four Forbidden Stars factions
The base game contains four asymmetric Warhammer 40,000 forces:
- Ultramarines — Space Marines of the Ultramarines chapter.
- Craftworld Iyanden — Eldar forces with their own unit and upgrade structure.
- Evil Sunz — Ork clan focused on aggressive warfare.
- World Eaters — Chaos Space Marines built around brutal combat pressure.
Each faction has its own units, combat deck, order upgrades, event cards and faction ability. The asymmetry goes considerably beyond different miniature sculpts.
The four order tokens
Forbidden Stars revolves around four basic order types:
- Advance — move units and initiate battles.
- Deploy — spend materiel to build units and structures.
- Dominate — collect assets from controlled worlds and use the faction’s Dominate ability.
- Strategize — buy order upgrades and combat upgrades.
Every faction starts with the same categories, but upgrades change what those orders can eventually do.
How hidden order stacking works
Players place orders facedown one at a time.
If a system already contains an order, the new one is placed on top of the stack. During Operations, only a token currently on top of a stack can be revealed.
This creates one of the game’s signature interactions. Suppose you intend to Deploy in a border system and later Advance from it. An opponent can place an order on top of your stack, forcing their operation to resolve before your sequence continues.
Editorial strategy principle: every order has two values — what the action does and where it sits in the stack.
Advance orders: movement and invasion
Advance is the military order. It moves ships and ground forces into the active system and can trigger combat when opposing units meet.
Because systems contain both worlds and void areas, naval control and planetary control interact without being identical.
Warp Storm borders can block movement between systems, so an attractive target may become inaccessible after an event shifts the map.
Deploy orders: units and structures
Deploy lets a faction spend materiel to purchase new units and structures in the active system.
Factories, cities and bastions are strategically important because the game is not won by owning empty space. Your economy, production capability and defensive position depend on controlled worlds and infrastructure.
Higher-level units can also require Forge-related resources or command improvements, so production quality matters as much as total materiel.
Dominate orders: extracting value from worlds
Dominate collects asset icons from friendly worlds in the active system.
Those assets can provide caches of materiel, reinforcement tokens or Forge resources. Each faction also has a special Dominate ability.
Dominate therefore rewards controlling the right planets rather than merely controlling the largest number of areas.
Strategize orders: upgrading your faction
Strategize lets you improve your order deck and combat deck.
This is the game’s technology/progression system. Rather than advancing along a universal research track, you purchase faction-specific upgrades that alter how familiar actions and battles work.
Investing too heavily can cost tempo because every Strategize token is an order not being used for immediate expansion or production.
How combat works
Combat combines unit strength, custom dice and faction combat cards.
Dice generate results such as hits, defenses and morale. Combat cards then modify those results and provide faction-specific effects.
This means the army with the largest plastic force is not automatically guaranteed to win. Card upgrades, morale and tactical timing can alter the battle substantially.
The combat system is intentionally more involved than simple “roll one die per unit” area-control combat.
Why morale matters
Forbidden Stars battles are not decided only by removing all opposing units.
Morale results can influence who wins a combat if both sides survive. That makes morale-heavy units or card effects strategically relevant even when they do not generate direct hits.
A force built only around damage can therefore lose important positional battles if it ignores the morale side of the combat system.
Combat and order upgrades
Every faction has upgrade decks tied to its identity.
Combat upgrades replace or improve cards in the faction’s battle deck. Order upgrades improve the four basic orders and are generally reusable once per round.
Because players choose which technologies to emphasize, two games with the same faction can develop differently depending on whether the player prioritizes economy, mobility, unit production or battle efficiency.
How Warp Storms change the map
Warp Storm tokens sit on edges between systems and can block normal movement across those borders.
During the Refresh Phase, event cards can move Warp Storms around the map.
This stops the strategic geography from becoming completely static. A route you planned around during setup may close, while another border can suddenly become attackable.
It also makes event-card timing more consequential than a generic random-event deck.
How objective tokens work
During setup, opponents place your faction’s objective tokens onto worlds.
At the start of each Refresh Phase, you collect your own objective token from every friendly world you control that contains one.
You cannot score another faction’s token. This makes the objectives intensely personal: a planet that is irrelevant to one opponent may be essential to another.
How do you win Forbidden Stars?
You win when you collect a number of your faction’s objective tokens equal to the number of players.
| Players | Objectives needed |
|---|---|
| 2 | 2 objectives |
| 3 | 3 objectives |
| 4 | 4 objectives |
If nobody has won by the end of round eight, the player with the most objective tokens wins. Official tie-breakers then consider friendly worlds and units on the board.
Can a player be eliminated?
Yes. A player with no friendly worlds is eliminated.
Their units are removed and they can no longer win. If only one player remains, that player wins immediately even without the normal objective requirement.
This makes protecting at least one secure world important even if your main strategic plan is aggressively focused on distant objectives.
What is the best player count?
The official range is 2–4 players. BoardGameGeek community voting currently favors three players.
Two players makes order reading more direct and produces a tighter duel. Three adds more uncertainty without filling every region with competing plans.
Four creates the most dramatic board politics and order interference but can also push sessions beyond the listed 120–180 minute range.
Does Forbidden Stars have solo play?
No official solo mode was published.
The hidden-order interactions, shared stacks and faction competition are fundamental to the design, so the base game assumes at least two human players.
Community solo variants exist, but they should not be confused with an official Fantasy Flight Games mode.
Why is Forbidden Stars out of print?
The game was not discontinued because Fantasy Flight announced a design problem or replacement edition.
Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop ended their licensing relationship. FFG officially announced that all Games Workshop-licensed product lines — including Forbidden Stars — would leave its catalog on February 28, 2017.
As of October 9, 2026, there is no official Forbidden Stars retail reprint.
Is Forbidden Stars getting a reprint?
There is currently no announced Warhammer 40,000 reprint of Forbidden Stars.
However, the underlying design has now returned in another form. Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins is officially described as an enhanced reimplementation of Forbidden Stars.
That distinction matters: Old Ones Origins preserves and develops the core system but uses Cthulhu Mythos factions rather than Games Workshop’s Warhammer setting.
Forbidden Stars vs Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins
| Feature | Forbidden Stars | Old Ones Origins |
|---|---|---|
| Theme | Warhammer 40,000 | Call of Cthulhu / Cthulhu Mythos |
| Status | Out of print | New 2026 crowdfunding project |
| Players | 2–4 | 2–4 |
| Core identity | Hidden orders, area control, asymmetric warfare | Enhanced reimplementation of the same design lineage |
| Designer link | Samuel W. Bailey co-designed | Samuel W. Bailey returns as designer |
| Best reason to choose | Warhammer setting and original faction design | Modern availability and updated system |
If you mainly want the mechanisms and cannot find Forbidden Stars at a sensible used price, Old Ones Origins is the most directly relevant modern alternative.
How Forbidden Stars relates to StarCraft: The Board Game
BoardGameGeek lists Forbidden Stars as a reimplementation of StarCraft: The Board Game.
The shared design DNA is especially visible in facedown order programming and area-control warfare.
Forbidden Stars streamlined and reworked that lineage into a Warhammer 40,000 game, and Old Ones Origins is now continuing the lineage again under another licence.
Forbidden Stars compared with other heavy conflict games
| Game | Shared appeal | Main difference |
|---|---|---|
| Eclipse: Second Dawn | Fleet building, technology and space warfare | Eclipse emphasizes economy and ship customization; Forbidden Stars emphasizes programmed orders and objective invasions. |
| Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition | Asymmetric factions, galactic conquest and political positioning | Twilight Imperium is broader and longer; Forbidden Stars is more focused on tactical order programming and combat. |
| Star Wars: Rebellion | Large armies, asymmetric conflict and major IP theme | Rebellion is a two-player hidden-base game; Forbidden Stars supports 2–4 and uses shared order stacks. |
| Blood Rage | Direct area conflict and asymmetric improvement | Blood Rage is a shorter drafting game; Forbidden Stars is a heavier spatial programming game. |
Should you buy an out-of-print copy?
There is no stable official retail price because Fantasy Flight no longer sells the game.
Secondary-market prices can vary dramatically by country, condition and completeness. BoardGameArchive therefore does not present a used-market asking price as if it were MSRP.
Before buying, verify that the copy contains the faction decks, upgrade cards, order tokens, system tiles, Warp Storms and faction-specific miniatures. Missing faction cards are particularly difficult to replace.
If the price is very high and you care more about mechanisms than Warhammer 40,000, compare the cost with Old Ones Origins before purchasing.
Seven strategy principles for new players
- Plan stacks, not individual actions. A Deploy followed by Advance only works if opponents do not interrupt the sequence.
- Objectives beat territory. Owning many worlds is useful only when it supports the objective race.
- Protect one economic core. Elimination is possible if you lose every friendly world.
- Do not ignore Strategize. Faction upgrades become increasingly important as armies improve.
- Read Warp Storm routes before committing. The geography can move underneath your plan.
- Morale can win battles. Do not evaluate combat only through expected hit totals.
- Track the eight-round clock. Late-game objective control matters even if nobody can reach the normal victory threshold.
Seven things to know before buying
- The game is officially out of print. There is no normal new-copy MSRP in 2026.
- There is no official solo mode.
- It is heavy. BGG complexity is around 3.84/5.
- Games can exceed three hours. Especially at four players or with new groups.
- Order programming is the core mechanism. If you dislike plans being disrupted by opponents, this may frustrate you.
- No official expansion line was completed. The Games Workshop licensing relationship ended before the system could develop further.
- Old Ones Origins is a reimplementation, not a reprint. It does not preserve the Warhammer factions.
Forbidden Stars FAQ
How many players?
2–4 players.
How long does it take?
BoardGameGeek lists 120–180 minutes, although learning games and four-player sessions can run longer.
Can it be played solo?
No official solo mode was published.
Which factions are included?
Ultramarines, Craftworld Iyanden Eldar, Evil Sunz Orks and World Eaters Chaos Space Marines.
What are the four orders?
Advance, Deploy, Dominate and Strategize.
How do you win?
Collect a number of your own objective tokens equal to the number of players, or have the most objectives after round eight if nobody reaches the normal threshold.
Why is Forbidden Stars out of print?
Fantasy Flight Games’ licensing relationship with Games Workshop ended, and Forbidden Stars left the FFG catalog on February 28, 2017.
Is a reprint announced?
No Warhammer 40,000 reprint has been announced as of October 9, 2026.
What is Old Ones Origins?
Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins is an enhanced reimplementation of Forbidden Stars using Cthulhu Mythos factions.
Is Forbidden Stars related to StarCraft: The Board Game?
Yes. BoardGameGeek lists Forbidden Stars as a reimplementation of StarCraft: The Board Game.
Sources and scope
- Fantasy Flight Games: original announcement, factions and core concept
- Fantasy Flight Games: official Learn to Play rules
- Fantasy Flight Games: official Rules Reference, objectives, victory, order stacks and eight-round limit
- Fantasy Flight Games: official Games Workshop licensing-end announcement and discontinuation date
- BoardGameGeek: current ranking, ratings, player count, play time and StarCraft/Old Ones Origins design lineage
- Chaosium: Old Ones Origins officially described as an enhanced Forbidden Stars reimplementation
Checked October 9, 2026. Forbidden Stars has been out of print since Fantasy Flight Games’ Games Workshop product lines ended in 2017. Used-market prices and availability are therefore unstable and are not treated here as official retail pricing. Rules explanations use Fantasy Flight’s official rulebooks. Strategy guidance and comparisons are original editorial analysis; no firsthand review or playtest is claimed. Editorial policy and corrections.