If there are no resources or goals nearby and the Alien is in a central area, you’re best off staying away from it.
The simple framework coupled with the Alien’s position on the map can sometimes mean your turn is best spent doing nothing. There’s another, more serious problem with the game, though. Keeping everyone alive despite repeated savagings feels like a soft cludge to keep everyone together at the table. In the movies, people die with gruesome frequency. While this prevents player elimination, it feels like an odd way to handle the danger of a rampant xenomorph. Instead, alien attacks run down an overall morale counter, leading to an instant loss if it reaches zero. None of the crew has individual health to track. This doesn’t happen often, but it feels like the Alien is chasing the crew member through the ship. If you do get attacked you have to flee, which can mean flipping more tokens leading to more attacks. But the variables involved mean there’s always scope for a nasty surprise.
You can take risks based on a crew member’s distance from the alien figure and how likely a Concealed token is to result in an attack. This is a good, simple system that creates a lot of suspense and cinematic moments.
But these cards often also instruct you to place a face down a Concealed token on a space which, when revealed, could send the Alien to that room to simulate an ambush. It has a figure on the board that moves a number of spaces towards the closest target depending on the encounter card. The titular Alien, however, is hunting you. You need to complete these objectives to progress the game. Most of these involve creating an item and taking it somewhere on the ship and are based on a scene from the film, like taking a flashlight to the med bay. At the start, you’ll reveal a number of objectives based on the player count. One thing that’s new to the formula is that you can collect scrap from around the ship and use it to craft items like flashlights and flamethrowers. Then you take an encounter card which may cause items to appear on the board, or move the alien. Your character has a pool of actions that they can use to move, pick and drop items, or activate a special power such as Ripley’s ability to move another crew member on her turn. If you’ve played one of Ravensburger’s cooperative before you’ll be familiar with the rough structure of Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. Rather than film stills, the cards and boards use specially commissioned art, but it looks great and helps set the scene. This being a licensed game, the player boards and their matching figures all look like the relevant characters from the film. Kane, the Alien’s first victim in the film, isn’t available as the action starts after his unfortunate demise. Beneath there’s a couple of punchboards of tokens, some decks of cards and a bag of soft plastic figures. On the business side of the board, there’s a slightly confusing split-level map of the Nostromo, the spaceship from the film. It’s a nice touch that ups the anticipation of delving through the contents. Like other Ravensburger games, the box opens to an image printed on the reverse of the board: in this instance it’s Jones the cat, hissing at you in fear. And it’s a cooperative game, meaning you all win or lose together, and it can also be played solo. It also has the commercial clout to ensure a competitive price and space on mass-market shelves. It’s published by Ravensburger, which has a good track record in making franchised board games with wide appeal. But they all had one thing in common: they were aimed at the hobby end of the market.Īlien: Fate of the Nostromo looks to cross that boundary. Others, like Legendary Encounters: Alien and Aliens: Another Day in the Corps, were. Some, like Lifeform, Space Hulk and Nemesis, weren’t licensed. Alien is such an iconic franchise that there’s no shortage of great games that have taken inspiration from it down the years.