As the name of the game suggests this game is an Alien themed deck building game.
Starting with the latter, for those not familiar with the concept of deck building games. Each player picks a character they want to play as, this character can be a medic, soldiers, officer, android among other things. Each character has a health profile, a special rule and 1 special card that makes the choice stand out compared to the other characters. Each player then begins with a hand of standard cards of low point value and also low combat value. In this game you have combat cards "Grunts" and economy cards "Specialists". The basic concept of the game is that you purchase new cards to add to your player deck using economy cards and fight aliens using your combat cards.
At the beginning of the game you will be very weak and many cards in your deck will spam your combat and economy possibilities with their low values. But as the game progresses you will upgrade your deck and start to kick ass. At least until an Alien eats your face. Fear not it is more interesting than Dominion – although it uses the very same core idea for the game mechanics. You draft a number of cards from your hand each turn, play the cards you can, and discard the rest. You repeat until you have played through your entire deck, after which you shuffle all cards and form a new deck. Repeat until victory – or death – occurs.
The Alien theme in this game is actually 4 separate modules using completely separate story and hero cards representing each of the 4 Alien movies (Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien resurrection).
You also have a bunch of cards that crossover, such as the core Grunt and Specialist cards, the damage deck and alien encounter deck. But the theme and flavor of each of the 4 Alien movies is very strong in each module as each is represented by objective cards, story cards, encounter cards and characters from each specific movie.
In the module representing the original Alien the 3 objective cards represent different parts of the movie. Objective 1 needs you to investigate an alien signal on the planet surface, during objective 2 all hell breaks loose and you need to weld shut air shafts on the Nostromo space ship, and the final objective forces you to manipulate the alien to end up in the room with the airlock to flush it out into space.
The objective cards require you to either play a combo of cards from your hand to unlock something, or play through the encounter cards until you stumble upon something that you are looking for. Each movie module deck is also built from 3 parts, or acts if you like, and the story continously progress as you play the game. However, the objectives are fixed in place and must be finished in a specific order. This means that you must do your best to finish objective 1 while you still draw "Act 1" cards from the deck, otherwise the difficulty level increases to a critical level and the scenario will be lost.
In the Alien module, this could mean that while you are having a hard time welding shut the air shafts in order to complete the 2nd objective card the Alien final boss card can appear and make the situation extremely deadly and possibility of victory end with your brains on the badly lit walls of Nostromo.
Check the full review over at my blog:
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shows how to make roads, using the formula of the late Ian Weekley.
