Big day of gaming! Well, a big day for one particular game, anyway.
Nemesis , first play. I tried to resist buying this, but it has so many positive reviews, all saying how much its like the Alien movie (the first movie). I have Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps that based around the second movie, and its (obviously) a much different movie and game. I love them both, of course.
Onto the game! We decided to try playing in full co-op mode, just thought it would be easier to learn the game. And we chose our classes, rather than do it the way the game wants (you draft from two class cards). I ended up with the Soldier, other players were the Pilot and the Scout. There’s a bit of setting up, as you lay out the various tiles representing the ship layout, and the various decks of cards required. The idea is that you’ve all awakened from hypersleep, with no memory of the ships layout. And there’s a corpse of a teammate lying there, which isn’t a good sign.
Each player gets an objective card with their conditions for winning the game. In a normal semi co-op mode, you have two objectives and will choose one to achieve during the game. In pure co-op, you just have a single objective. Mine was to send the signal (back to Earth) and explore all the rooms. Another player had to collect an alien egg, and the last player had to also send the signal, and destroy either the entire ship or the alien nest. It doesn’t matter who achieves the objective, but all of them have to be done. We decided destroying the ship would be easier, and we would get off the ship in the escape pods. Which, of course, don’t start unlocked.
Each class has its own deck of ten cards, and also a starting weapon. And you have two cards that you can create as you go along (which none of us did…). You have a hand of five cards each turn, and you take two actions per turn, using basic actions like moving, shooting, picking up objects, trading, and crafting. You can also use actions from cards or from the room you’re in. Each action has a cost, paid by discarding cards from your hand. You can also search a room for items, which can come in handy.
So, off we went, a bit slowly as we had to check rules quite often. Moving between rooms requires you to roll a noise die, which places noise tokens in a corridor. If a corridor gets two noise tokens, an alien intruder is drawn from the bag and placed on the board. And this isn’t Aliens, where you can mow down aliens with your M56 Smartgun, while screaming “Lets rock!”. Even with a weapon, you might be better off running away.
One of our players had the misfortune of moving into a slime room (there’s no way of knowing what a room is until you explore it. There are worse things than being slimed, but it’s not that great either. Our first couple of encounters drew larva, the most basic of intruders, only needing a single hit to kill. Then we pulled the Queen (the biggest of the intruder types), but luckily the Nest room hadn’t been found yet, so the Queen didn’t actually appear on the board. We continued exploring (since that was an objective), and we needed the nest to get an egg. We checked the engines and found two out of three of them were damaged, which would destroy the ship. Fine, that was the plan anyway.
I had my first encounter with an adult intruder. I thought, being the Soldier class, surely this wouldn’t be too bad. I rolled a blank, so that missed. Tried to attack again on my next turn, still failed. We eventually found the Next, it was (of course) the very last room tile we explored. I picked up an egg, since the character that needed the egg would have to drop her weapon to pick one up (because she was injured). I’d picked up a couple of contaminated cards as well. These fill up your hand, and can’t be used as discards. If you don’t find a way of getting rid of them, they need to be scanned at the end of the game.
So, I eventually made it to the escape pod and off the ship. But I had three contamination cards. The first two were clear, but the third was positive for infection. To check, you put the card in a scanner, which then shows the words, its very clever. With the infected card, I needed to shuffle my deck, with the contaminated cards, and then draw four cards. If any of them were contaminations, I was dead. And, first draw, bam! Sadly, I died, and we failed to complete the objectives. All up, it took us about six hours, twice as long as I expected. But it didn’t feel that long, which is a credit to the game. It feels like the odds are against you, especially at the end when you are trying to get into an escape pod, and any intruders can stop you. We were all pretty drained by the end. So we played some lighter games after it.
Nova Luna , close game, I was only two tokens behind, couldn’t do it.
Oriflamme , which I also failed to win (despite the group saying I win all the time). I still love it, and have the expansion on order.
Bandido , we just can’t give up on this game until we win. We had two games, and things looked promising at first, but then it just gets out of control. Still fun, if a little annoying when we lose.
)? It’s a bit weird.
instead.