Legendary Encounters Alien Game Review

I could not wait for this egg to hatch

While I do blog about board games I am also a movie nerd. There is one film franchise that shrieked into my teen years, hugged my face and burst my chest with love. I am of course talking about Alien. I seem to have been in cryo-stasis or something because I had not heard about the Legendary Encounters: Alien game until GameALot where I was asked out of the blue if I would like to play. What followed was a round of Aliens themed combat horror that made me want to run home and watch the entire series all over again. (I did just that over the following week.)

I am so glad I went to that event.

Opened the box to craft paper and foam filler.

I want to do nothing but gush about this game so I’m going to start with the negatives; I don’t want to forget about them. First of all upon opening the box I was immediately disappointed in the amount of filler paper in it. I paid almost $70 for craft paper? Either Upper Deck is planning on some serious expansions for this game or they get a special bulk deal on this size of box. I have to warn you, when you buy this game go home into a room where you can swear a lot and seethe with rage at Upper Deck for a couple of hours because what followed was sorting through cards. There are several sealed packs of what seems to be a random assortment of cards which need sorted into a playable order. I'm guessing these were packed by however they were fired off the print press. This is a normal thing for collector cards but when you are designing a non-collectible game it’s a major faux pas to pass such a critical quality control step. It took about an hour and a half to sort the cards into their playing decks and the rules don’t explain these decks very well. Also depending on your point of view you may or may not like that this game is extremely hard to beat. For a fan like me that fits the theme as the Aliens do kill a lot of people, of course I love a challenge.

Cards sorted

The things I loved when opening the box are the high quality of the cards and player mat. The artwork and design are beautiful. The included fabric covered mat works better as it prevents the glossy cards from sliding everywhere as opposed to a glossy board. Physically game play is smoother.

I’m not the biggest fan of the Legendary series nor am I a fan of deck building games in general but for the Aliens theme the concept actually works extremely well. If you aren’t familiar with deck building games they work by each player starting with a small deck of cards. Each turn the player has a hand of 6 cards drawn from their personal deck which they use in any combination to perform actions: buying cards, causing damage, or other special actions. Buying cards from the central deck, called the crew deck in Legendary Encounters: Alien, is very important as these cards increase the power and versatility of your deck. As you build your deck it becomes increasingly important to kill the low value cards. When a card is killed it is removed from your deck permanently. By doing this to low value cards you ensure stronger card combinations come into your hand each turn.

The cooperative team aspect works very well in the game. This is highlighted by the “coordinate” cards. A player may allow another player to borrow these cards in order to complete an action they would otherwise not be able to do. An example is in the Sergeant deck that has 10 of these cards, 2 each of the 5 different power icons. These have a card buy power of 2, so if multiple players coordinate they can buy a player a very strong card. While the Sergeant cards aren’t the best cards as you select them blindly and get random power icons I find they are still extremely valuable throughout the game and each player should buy a couple early on.

This board pic won't upload the right way around!

Combat is what everyone looks for in the game and I find the mechanic really suits the Alien theme. There is an enemy deck that feeds into the facility. Each turn a new face down enemy enters the facility and displaces any it encounters further into the facility. These cards can be turned face up with a combat cost. This cost isn’t applied as damage though, it just lets you know what’s there. Should the facility fill (and it will fast) these cards are moved face up into the combat area. Cards that enter the combat zone are turned face up and effects are immediate. Any Xenomorphs in the combat area that are not killed on a players turn cause a strike on the player. Too many strikes can kill a character, and since this is Aliens people die often. The fact that you know there is an unknown enemy slowly creeping into combat range can be quite stressful and the creepy factor of the atmosphere sells the theme. Also the gamble of revealing enemies is scary because it can be anything, a lowly drone, an event, a hazard, the queen or...

One scary thing is if a facehugger card is turned over it immediately attacks the current player no matter where in the facility it was revealed. If the facehugger is not killed by that player or the next the facehugged player gains a chestburster card into their discard pile. Eventually when the player draws the chestburster card that character dies horribly and painfully… BUT they come back as a Xenomorph! Their goal is now to kill the players with cards drawn from a new deck of Alien cards. It's a cool twist where players killed can come back into the game. Typically this really swerves the power into the favour of the Aliens.  I wish there was another mechanic where players killed otherwise could still participate.

Of course there has to be a twist, because it is never simply just killing Xenomorphs in the Alien universe. No each game you play has a facility and a set of three goals which alter the game. The box includes 4 facility cards and 12 goals. These are divided along the four movies. The facilities come into play when hazard cards are drawn. These hazards can be minor or major such as the Nostromo self destruct activating. The goals fit with themes in the movies like "They mostly come out at night... mostly" where your goal is to set up sentry guns. I agree with the recommendation in the rule book of playing with goals and facilities in order according to the movies but you can mix and match as you see fit. If you are a fanboy or fangirl you are going to love this mechanic as you see which of your friends would survive the movies. Set up and take down will take a while as there are so many specific cards that only apply to certain scenarios but I find it makes each play through a very singular experience. The work is well worth the play payoff.

The player deck is also separated into crews and crew members. The rules state you should have a 4 crew member deck. Of course if you are following the movies you don’t have to bother separating the crew members out of their respective crew decks to save yourself some time in set up and take down. Each crew currently has 4 crew members, so this is where expansions can definitely come in to play. Of course if you want you can play with a 4 Ripley crew deck. I find the optional nature of the game really allows you to streamline your play experience. If you don’t like certain films leave those cards in the box and play what you love, or play to how you would have made the movie.

There is a traitor option for the game. It’s like the running theme in the movies about someone having a weird almost love vibe with the Xenomorphs. It’s the whole reason Resurrection happens. At the beginning of the game a good alignment card is randomly selected for each player, then one evil alignment card is added to that deck. The cards are shuffled and one given to each player. Good players play as usual but the Evil player tries to undermine the rest, have them all killed so they can have The Company come claim their Xenomorph prize. When your alignment is revealed it adds a card to your deck. The traitor element doesn’t seem to be designed well for me as the traitor reveals are forced when a Secrets Revealed card appears. It’s too random and anticlimactic. However there is a rule for blind alignment draws where people only learn their role when forced by the Secrets Revealed card.

But lets go back to speaking of expansions; everything about the game has an air of future expansions. The empty space in the box, the limited number of crew members, material from the video games and comics, the Prometheus prequel and Prometheus 2 in the works, and the fact that everyone knows AVP is a huge thing. While I usually am against AVP I think this game is engineered well enough to handle it (and it would probably work better than the traitor option.) Of course the game is compatible with the Marvel Legendary product line. Upper deck also announced that they do have licences for Firefly and Predator. Once these products are out I would like to see an expansion set out for blending Aliens with them. After all there are a host of Aliens Vs crossovers out there. And as fans of the series know Aliens take on characteristics of their hosts, Humans make humanoid Xenomorphs, animals make 4 legged "Runner" Xenomorphs, then there is the Pred-alien. What would a Hulk Alien look like?

I must point out that the game does have a 17+ rating on the box. If you know the franchise you know why the box has it. If the game strayed from the violent swearing gore-fest of the movies it wouldn’t be worth that pile of filler paper in the box. Of course this makes Legendary Encounters Alien less of a family game. Unless you are okay with facehugging and chestbursting children while exposing them to harsh language… then have fun.

To sum up Legendary Encounters Alien is pretty much the gateway game to trying deck building games, I'm actually considering having another go at Marvel Legendary now. I would recommend this game for any teen to adult fan of the franchise who is up for a cooperative game they will rarely ever win. Don’t expect to pick up the game and start playing right away. The cards in the box are packaged so randomly you would think the designers hated people for buying the game. However once you get past the initial frustration the Legendary Encounters Alien is a game designed for a fan and will present so much enjoyment.

Until next time: