{"id":19601,"date":"2022-12-20T08:46:20","date_gmt":"2022-12-20T16:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19601"},"modified":"2022-12-20T08:46:20","modified_gmt":"2022-12-20T16:46:20","slug":"boardgame-_alien-fate-of-the-nostromo_","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2022\/12\/20\/boardgame-_alien-fate-of-the-nostromo_\/","title":{"rendered":"Boardgame: _Alien: Fate of the Nostromo_"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I recently came across a mention of the cooperative boardgame Alien: Fate of the Nostromo<\/cite>; it sounded interesting, so even though I have about half a dozen other boardgames that I haven\u2019t played yet, I bought this one.<\/p>\r\n

It\u2019s set on the spaceship Nostromo<\/i> during the first Alien<\/cite> movie, but you don\u2019t need to know much of anything about the movie to play and enjoy the game, other than that there\u2019s an alien stalking the ship.<\/p>\r\n

One might expect this to be a horror game, but it turns out not to be especially scary. I would say it\u2019s kind of Alien<\/cite> Lite\u2014for example, no crew members die during the game. Instead, when any crew member encounters the Alien, the group loses morale points (and the crew member has to run away); if you run out of morale points before achieving your objectives, you collectively lose the game.<\/p>\r\n

(I gather that the game\u2019s designer originally framed that mechanism as being a fear meter, with the group gaining fear points over time (and if you get too many, you lose), but that the publisher (Ravensburger) changed it to losing morale points instead. It\u2019s effectively the same mechanism either way.)<\/p>\r\n

Most of the action of the game consists of moving around the ship, acquiring \u201cscrap\u201d tokens, crafting various useful devices using the scrap, and using those devices to evade the Alien or reduce the impact of encountering it. Then you take the devices to various specified locations to achieve the objectives.<\/p>\r\n

(If you have n players, there are n+1 randomly chosen objective cards that you can see from the beginning of the game; you have to fulfill all of those objectives in order to move on to the \u201cFinal Mission\u201d phase of the game, in which a randomly chosen extra-hard objective is added. So each time you play, the goals are somewhat different.)<\/p>\r\n

Some of the game mechanics have some similarities to Pandemic, though they aren\u2019t exactly the same as Pandemic. (Most of the things I\u2019m thinking of are also somewhat similar to some other coop games; but a couple of them feel particularly Pandemic-ish to me.) For example: each of the five crew members has a special ability; each turn consists of a crew member taking four actions (usually) and then drawing a card from the bad-stuff-happens deck; over time, the worst cards get shuffled back into said deck, so the worst stuff gets concentrated, making things harder as time goes on.<\/p>\r\n

I won very easily in a practice solo game, but it turned out that that was partly due to luck\u2014I drew few if any of the worst cards, and I managed to quickly and easily craft a couple of items that made it nearly impossible for the alien to catch me.<\/p>\r\n

Our three-person game on Sunday (masked, outdoors, distanced) was significantly harder\u2014more objectives to accomplish, a couple of situations where multiple characters had to be in specified places at the same time (requiring some coordination), and worse luck with the worst cards than I had had in my solo game. But we still won without too<\/em> much difficulty.<\/p>\r\n

The rules include a harder mode in which the character Ash (from the movie) wanders around the ship stealing scrap from the players, but I gather that\u2019s more an annoyance than a really difficult version. The game designer has also published a super-hard \u201cDirector\u2019s Cut<\/a>\u201d variant ruleset on BoardGameGeek; that variant looks to me to be harder than I would want to play.<\/p>\r\n

Speaking of BGG, there\u2019s a very useful FAQ<\/a> there\u2014the rules that come in the box are mostly reasonably clear, but there are several important situations and issues that the rules don\u2019t cover, or don\u2019t cover well. The FAQ helps a lot with that.<\/p>\r\n

Overall, I would say the game is an enjoyable and relatively lightweight cooperative game for up to 5 players. (Apparently it gets much harder as the player count goes up.) Pretty easy to learn (especially for players familiar with other coop games), and gameplay flows smoothly and quickly. Fans of the original movie and\/or of horror games might be disappointed at the lack of gore and scariness, but I was happy with that lack.<\/p>\r\n

Oh, and Jonesy the cat can also appear in the game, though he didn\u2019t show up either of the two times I\u2019ve played.<\/p>\r\n

\u2026Now I just need to get around to playing all those other unplayed games before more games arrive\u2026<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19602,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19601\/revisions\/19602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}