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!

Another Alien Game!

Wow, there are a lot of tabletop games based on the Alien franchise. My boys and I love this universe, however, so if companies keep makin' 'em, we'll keep buyin' 'em. 

Today we picked up Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. With Amy and Matthew in San Francisco at a swim meet, Nathaniel and I ventured out to Target. I had intended on buying the Gargoyles board game, but we were both intrigued by another take on the Alien mythos, especially since this one gets right back to the roots of this franchise. 

More akin to Forbidden Island and games of that ilk than skirmish games like AVP, this Alien game features virtually no combat. Instead, you move around iconic locations from the Nostromo, gathering resources, accomplishing objectives, and working toward an escape plan, all the while doing your best to avoid the xenomorph. Sometimes you know where it is and can plan accordingly, while other times you only think you know where it is and then it appears exactly where you don't want it to!

On our first try, Nathaniel was Dallas and I was Parker. We had some bad luck on card draws and only managed to win on the last-possible turn when I remembered that Parker had an item that could clear the xenomorph out of our escape path. The second time, I tried Dallas and Nathaniel opted for Lambert, whose ability to see the next encounter card (essentially, the next action taken by the alien) proved to be incredibly useful.

Here's a pic of the game board from early in our second adventure.

And now here's a shot of the game's final turn, when Dallas obliterated the xenomorph with an incinerator unit.

We won that second game handily. When Matthew and Amy get back, we'll try a four-player game. I'm sure Lambert will be among the character choices, and I'd be surprised if Nathaniel didn't want to use her again. And what about Ripley? In our opinion, she's actually the least effective character in the game!

Skyward Bound!

Of the "Forbidden" series of cooperative tile-based board games -- including the original, Forbidden Island, and its sequel, Forbidden Desert -- we find Forbidden Sky to be the most challenging. There are a lot of ways to lose, and the game feels more luck-driven than its two predecessors. In our house, only Nathaniel, playing solo, had ever beaten it -- and that was just once.

Today, with Matthew in San Francisco at a Pacific Swim all-star meet, Nathaniel and I sat down for a session of Sky, with he as the medic and I as the surveyor. Despite near-constant lightning strikes, we managed to get the components on the board quickly and into as tight a configuration as possible. We both made it to the landing pad with one tick left on the storm tracker. Laying the last piece of wire to complete the circuit and thereby trigger the lights and sounds of the rocket was, honestly, a lot more satisfying than I expected it to be!

Merry Merry!

Hope you all have a great holiday season with your families! Here at our house, we'll have the most gaming-filled Christmas ever, as the boys are getting a long-overdue modern video game system (an Xbox One) along with a handful of games.

I'm still not a big-time video game fan, however, so I'm even more excited about some of the other gifts. They've got one of the Zombicide sequels coming, along with the highly acclaimed Betrayal at House on the Hill and an additional expansion box. Best of all, perhaps, is Forbidden Sky, the newest entry in the "Forbidden" series (following Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, which may be the two most frequently played board games in the Sutton household). The boys will also find their stockings stuffed with the new Space Marine Heroes line of individual randomized models for Warhammer 40k. Perhaps we'll paint them up as Blood Angels in honor of the upcoming 40k animated series, Angels of Death.

Christmas can't come soon enough!

Holiday Fun

I hope you're all having a great holiday season! Ours has been pretty quiet. Bad weather in the Sierra Nevada mountains whittled down our Los Angeles trip to a mere few days (including driving down there on Christmas Day), but Santa brought us a lot of fun new game stuff, including a Pershing and a Panther IV for our Tanks armies, the fantastic Forbidden Island (the predecessor to Forbidden Desert, a family favorite), and Poop: The Game (it's a real thing).

See you in 2017!