REVIEW: Aliens: Another Glorious Day In The Corps
Players: 1-6
Play Time: 1-2 hours
Age: 14+
Designer: Andrew Haught
Artists: Jose David Lanza Cebrian, Victor Pesch
Publisher: Gale Force Nine
Please note: while the link above will take you to a site where you can purchase this game, I receive no compensation for any sales. I merely want to support my local game shop.
tl;dr
I loved this game. A bit complicated to get started in terms of the turn mechanics, but once it starts moving, it has a nice flow.
Going Deeper
Unboxing
First, this game is gorgeous. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the artwork and the materials when I unboxed it. I’ve found that with a lot of licensed games, there isn’t as much emphasis on quality; a lot of times it’s just a money grab, with the assumption that people will buy the game because of the property.
Not the case with Aliens: Another Glorious Day In The Corps. The game pieces are all thick cardboard with full-bleed artwork, and seemingly firmly laminated. The cards are all a nice thickness and glossy stock and easily handled.
Though, upon unboxing, I hit my first hiccup: the Colonial Marines, Ripley, and xenomorph figures come disassembled on a model tree and unpainted. Assembling the figures took a couple of hours and requires glue.
The xenomorphs were especially a pain in the ass, as the connection points for the tails and where the legs meet the base don’t have a lot of surface area. The tails kept falling off, and the legs didn’t always bond. And there are 16 of them that need to be assembled, and each one has 7 pieces, so there was a lot to do there.
And, because I’m me, I couldn’t let them stay monochrome. They were begging to be painted. Below are the before and after pictures. I used a typical miniature technique of primer, base, wash, and drybrush on the player pieces. The dry brushing was almost required, I thought on the base to make the different names stand out; otherwise, they are very hared to see. (But then, I’m almost 45, so take from that what you will.) The xenomorphs simply got a light blue dry brush.
Gameplay
I really dig the map setup. There are four large map tiles, with a different map on each side: one is the Hadley’s Hope colony, the other the infested power station. The tiles can be configured in different ways to create a variety of maps, which is just cool.
You can play the game as a standalone mission, or as a campaign; again, a nice touch that doesn’t occur very often with “typical” tabletop board games.
The game rules book is organized well, and pretty easy to understand. It can be easy to get bogged down in errata, or just with complicated rules, but that’s not the case here. Game Designer Andrew Haught did a great job with designing a simple system that can be surprisingly deep.
The mission cards are pretty clear for how to set everything up. We were playing on a folding table, which didn’t afford the space we really needed; everything was a bit cramped on the table. Future plays will require a larger space. (And yes, there will be future plays.)
But hiccup #2: why, oh why won’t they design a game box that has spots to keep the multiple little game pieces organized?! This game has blip tokens, alien swarm tokens, barricade tokens, and more tokens…and not a place to store them! I resorted to using plastic bags, but man, would having a tray make this so much much better.
We decided to play Mission 1, which was to find and save Newt.
The first round of gameplay was a little clunky as we figured out the rules, and what needed to happen on each turn, but once we got through that, things started to move along quickly. We encountered a xenomorph quickly, and it was quickly dispatched. “Oh!” we thought. “These things aren’t that hard to kill. Maybe we have a chance here.”
And, as is typical with cooperative games, the odds are not in the players’ favor. Three turns in and things started to escalate quickly: Newt wouldn’t come with us for 2 turns (we failed our dice rolls), and the xenomorphs started spawning more quickly.
Alas, in the end, with the exit in sight, we ran out of Endurance cards, which is a lose condition in the game.
But it was still a ton of fun.
While this can be played by one person by themselves, I hope to play through the campaign with friends at some point.