Ripley, Believe It or Not

This weekend, we played a couple of four-player games of Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. The first time around, a few early xenomorph encounters sapped our morale, and one of our objectives was devilishly difficult: getting all the heroes to the workshop, located in a remote corner of the ship. We had three of the four crammed into that room and the fourth just outside in the hallway when my character, Parker, drew a card that booted him immediately to the medbay. A moment later the alien jumped him and, well, that was that. 

For the second game, I swapped Parker for Ripley, the only character we hadn't used yet. I had poo-pooed Ripley earlier, during the two-player games that Nathaniel and I had played the previous weekend, but I quickly discovered Ripley's effectiveness in a session with a larger number of players. 

Games like this one (e.g., Forbidden Island and its sequels, the Pandemic games, etc.) don't scale well above a certain number of players because the game takes its turn after each player, so a lot of nasty stuff can happen in between your turns and you're powerless to prevent it. That's why Ripley is an essential character in larger Alien games -- her ability is to move other characters during her turn. So, for example, if the xenomorph is stalking closer to Matthew's Brett and his turn won't come up fast enough for him to escape, I can use Ripley's actions to move Brett out of harm's way. 

With a whopping five objectives to accomplish, we spread out through the ship, assembled various items, and brought them to the specified locations. After completing the fifth task, we drew the card for our final mission. It turned out be fleeing the Nostromo on the shuttle, like Ripley does at the end of the movie. (Fortunately, in this version, we weren't dealing with a self-destruct sequence on top of that!) 

We had to gather an incinerator, a cat carrier (for Jonesy!), and one coolant tank per crew member and then all convene at the docking bay. It's always tricky to get multiple characters into a location without the alien crashing the party, but Nathaniel's Dallas was armed with the incinerator and shooed the xenomorph away when it was just outside the door to the docking bay. That gave me enough time to have Ripley drop the fourth and final coolant tank, thereby enabling our escape from the ship!