Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps , an epic game that went for 4+ hours. Which I really didn’t notice, the time just flew by. Unlike Gloomhaven, which always feels long for me. The mission was Mission 3 – Survive, the expanded mission from the Get Away From Her You Bitch expansion. Ripley and Newt start in a barricaded room with two facehuggers, and no weapons or equipment. The other marines have to unbarricade the room as soon as possible. It doesn’t seem possible to get thru the barricades before Newt and Ripley get attacked. There’s enough movement to reach the door, but then you have no actions left to attempt the unbarricade. And there are two doors you have to get through. The facehuggers don’t kill you, but if you fail your defense roll, you’re impregnated, and will die at the end of the mission. Faithful to the movie I guess, I don’t believe anyone managed to survive after being attacked by a hugger. Anyway, Ripley managed to defend against their attack, but Newt was not so lucky.
We got to play with the sentry guns, added them to the main corridor so they could blast any aliens that came across. Worked pretty well. Unfortunately sentry guns will shoot at anything, even player characters, so we couldn’t move out into the corridor ourselves until the guns ran out of ammo. I’ve seen a suggestion on bgg that you should be able to turn off the guns, just so you don’t have to waste turns waiting for them to run dry.
Turn five, the dropship came down and we knew which exit to take. Starting with turn four, you roll to see if the dropship arrives, and if it does, you roll for one of the two exits to be active.
So it was a run to the exit, with quite a few aliens blocking our route. We barricaded doors on the other exit, and the blips just piled up there. Would have been nasty if they had gotten out and came up behind us. We’ve been rolling pretty well for the barricades (aliens break thru on a dice roll of 4,5,6 from a D6). Dietrich was the star, clearing out almost every group of the aliens in front of us with her flamethrower. The flamer seems like a great weapon, it’s only weakness is that you can’t use it for defensive fire when the aliens attack.
The Crew , hadn’t played this for a while. Failed at first, then succeeded, needed a bit of luck.
Biblios , one of my favourite filler games, always a hit
Nova Luna , such a close game, we were all down to our last 2 tokens.
Byzanz , another great filler. If you like auctions, you’ll like this.
Canvas , finished the night with a relaxing game of creating paintings. And when I say relaxing, I mean compulsively shuffling your art cards around to achieve the objectives. I wouldn’t have thought this game was particularly AP prone, but we had some long turns. Still, a lot of fun.
More gaming on Sunday, just 2 player
Lost Ruins of Arnak . I was completely annihilated, as I was for my first game of this. I’m obviously doing something fundamentally wrong. Still enjoying it tho, its a pretty good game.
Canvas , played two more games of this. Very quick at 2p.
Biblios , again, pretty quick at 2p
Nova Luna , went ok at this, won. Had a bit of luck, two of the same coloured tiles next to each other, both 2s, so I could take and play both, completed about 4 objectives.
Obviously I like it and I can see the comparisons with Machi Koro and yet this one is so much more satisfying and also: space based–yep I had to go there (although I personally do not want to go to space not in this day and age). I expect this game to play faster with more players because one gets more passive income turns and thus can probably get into the second and third row of the market quicker. But it’s still fun at 2.