This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Alien: Fate of the Nostromo
Designer: Scott Rogers
Year: 2021
Country: U.S.A.
Publisher: Ravensburger
Ordinarily, when I see a boardgame based on a geek license, I make a series of assumptions. It’s going to be a reskin of some other game with the superficial veneer of the license in question, or it’s going to be faithful, accurate and at least four hours long with a bucketful of small tokens you have to sort into neat piles.
Alien: Fate of the Nostromo is neither of those things. We had time to complete three playthroughs in one evening, and the experience replicated the vibe of the first Alien film very well. We are on a spaceship. There’s an alien on the loose. We can’t fight it, so we have to play cat and mouse while fulfilling random objectives which resolve the situation one way or another.
The design is elegant and pared down, minimalistic while still delivering on the narrative experience.
Each player controls one of the crew members from the movie, Ripley being the most famous. They each have a special ability such as getting an extra action on their turn or being able to craft items for free. The game is co-op, so the players work together to try to fulfill the randomly selected objectives before the morale track runs out.
The morale track is essentially a collective hit point pool: Each time someone encounters the alien, there’s a danger that morale suffers. If it suffers enough, the players lose the game. The collective morale track is a way to make encounters with the alien dangerous without the danger of characters dying or being incapacitated the way character-specific hit points do. All players remain in the game until the end.
One of the game’s great virtues was the mutability of the game state. The alien moved towards the nearest player character, or alternatively could also pop up from a random tile triggered by a character’s arrival at a location. It felt dangerous, unpredictable but not totally impervious to player action. During our third playthrough, we’d learned enough tricks to affect the alien’s movements at least a little.
The game has a hard mode but for us, the normal mode had a plenty of challenge. Our first two playthroughs ended in failure as the morale track reached zero. It was only on the third try that we’d understood the tactics required to grasp how to win. It also helped that our luck held and we didn’t suffer serious setbacks on the home stretch.
Despite our failures, it didn’t feel like our fun was impacted negatively. I’d say this was because the Alien franchise puts you in a mindspace where you can only survive by the skin of your teeth. Losing felt narratively appropriate.
My only regret is that I didn’t get to use the cat carrier I crafted on our last playthrough.