DISCLAIMER: Geek Native received a free review copy of ALIEN: Fate of the Nostromo for the purposes of writing this review.
Again, to clarify, half of Geek Native have reviewed ALIEN: Fate of the Nostromo. Mainly because of our busy schedules and how we need to, as Girdy often says, divide and conquer.
But how lucky was I to be offered a free review copy of this amazing game by Ravensburger?! I jumped faster than your average facehugger at the chance.
Now here I am, having completed my first game as Ripley, along with my partner, Murdo, who chose Parker as his character.
Sadly, Jonesy the cat is not a playable character, but as you can probably guess, he does feature in this game as more than just a nice graphic (more about that below).
First appearance and unboxing
I love that the first thing you see when you open the box, is Jonesy hissing – which is an important point I’ll get back to!
It’s an exceptionally cool first unboxing impression to give, once the player gets over the initial familiar Alien logo, and the very sleek box.
Once you’ve got Jonesy out the way, you’re presented with the game instructions, and variations poppable cardboard bits and pieces that you’re going to need for playing the game.
Reader, you better get poppin’! POP POP POP POP POP POP!!!
Assembling the board
Assembling the board is fairly straightforward once you’ve gotten all the pieces out and follow the instructions. It was really a piece of cake, and there’s a nice ‘new board game’ feeling when setting it all up for the first time. Full of possibilities! Lovely stuff.
Once assembled, the board should look a little something like this (we’d already chosen our characters, selected our three objective cards, and were just about to begin the game in this photo).
As you can see, it’s quite an attractive board which shows the layout of the Nostromo over two floors. It’s easy to see where you can go up and down ladders to travel up or down.
The pieces
In the game, you get to play one of five crew members, which each crew member getting its own plastic figurine… and then there’s the xenomorph. Because of course there is! No facehuggers, though.
Each character has a corresponding character sheet, with special abilities that are unique to that character. Choose carefully! Or at random, it doesn’t matter because you won’t know which scenarios you’re going to get until after.
Gameplay
The instructions took a while to read through, but once we had, we found the actual gameplay to be good fun, with a fair amount of strategy and thinking involved.
I should also make it clear that in the game, players aren’t pitted against each other (so, it’s not like the last game I reviewed where I was out to beat Murdo); instead, they work in a team to beat the alien together and survive the mission.
It’s not a walk in the park, either! My character, Ripley, seemed to be quite unlucky in that she kept getting random encounters with the xenomorph, losing morale – and we did come very close to losing our first game, which added quite a sense of urgency.
Certainly we would have lost if we had different characters, but Parker’s ability to generate scrap helped us in this scenario – as did Ripley’s ability to move another character one space. I was also able to craft an incinerator (basically the flamethrower) which I enjoyed a great deal.
Some random encounters with Jonesy meant he would hiss at us, also making us lose morale. One thing I wasn’t happy about was that despite being able to craft the cat carrier, I didn’t get the opportunity to save Jonesy before the ship self destructed. JONESY, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Game issues
We did find a couple of game issues on our first playthrough of ALIEN: Fate of the Nostromo, in that both of the self destruct final mission cards appear to have two different typos.
One card is missing a word before ‘one token from the self destruct tracker’. It could be ‘add’ or ‘remove’ – likely ‘remove’, as per the other self destruct card.
The other typo is that both cards also say that the crew member places four tokens on the self destruct tracker when the mission starts – but, the defeat condition is if they start their turns with the four tokens.
This just seems to be very unclearly worded, as the instructions clearly state the defeat condition is if they can’t remove a token – which makes more sense, as just going by the card alone, it sounds like they would lose on their very first turn.
If you’re ever confused, just refer back to the instruction booklet; it’ll keep you right.
Overall
Aside from a couple of minor niggles mentioned above, both of us really enjoyed playing ALIEN: Fate of the Nostromo, and it’s a great game for any Alien fans to own. I’m already thinking about trying to play this with my dad!
The gameplay was easy to get a hang of, and I quite liked the randomness of the encounter cards. You never quite know what you’ll get next, and they can change the board quite markedly, so it doesn’t get boring.
Victory was a very close thing, and I can see how adding more players might increase the chaos and make for even worse luck – or, y’never know, it could be to your advantage. This is definitely something I’ll want to try playing in a larger group with different missions, just to see how it might play out.
We didn’t exactly time the gameplay, but for two of us, I’d say it took us around 30 minutes to do the initial setup and read over the rules, then around an hour to play the game – which is not bad at all! Definitely a fun way to spend an evening.
Fancy playing ALIEN: Fate of the Nostromo yourself having read this review? You can pick up your copy from Amazon.
What do you think of this review of ALIEN: Fate of the Nostromo – does it make you want to play it? Have I missed anything? Would you like to see more reviews like this? All comments welcome.
