Aliens board game is another ho-hum dungeon crawler

Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps is a special version. Aliens, James Cameron’s sequel to the sci-fi classic Extraterrestrial is frankly one of the best action movies ever made, so the excitement surrounding this new cardboard adaptation isn’t surprising. The problem? We’ve seen it all before.

Aliens first received a tabletop implementation with a solid design from 1989 released by Leading Edge. The spirit of the film was further embodied in the Games Workshop classic Space hulk, a game that was Aliens in everything except the name. Space hulk influenced hundreds of tabletop dungeon crawlers ever since, each paying homage to their predecessors and re-encapsulating that basic tense experience with tiny gaps.

So Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps already faces a challenge: how to be something new? Designer Andrew Haught recognized this obstacle and introduced a seemingly unique central mechanism called the “endurance bridge”. Everything else in this game is secondary. Plastic miniatures of Hicks, Ripley, and around 20 aliens are all in the background. The fog of war blows, clearly influenced by Space hulk, are just another tool. The lovingly crafted graphic design that covers every square inch of this game is simply a veneer.

But the Endurance deck is the lifeblood of the game. Players control multiple Marines, spend cards to use their weapons, and initiate special abilities. Even the new equipment comes into play through the bridge. Sometimes players also trigger a negative event from this deck, adding to the sense of danger lurking around every corner.

In some ways, this system is sleek and smart. It condenses multiple ideas (gear, events, and abilities) into a single mechanism, saving table space and reducing rule overload.

The thematic achievement is even more important. You use up the cards in the Endurance deck to pay for actions, sometimes removing them permanently from play. The decreasing number of cards over time represents the decline in morale and resources of your party. The deck provides a clear sense of dread that escalates through the arc of play. It will often mimic the state of the board, sustaining tension as the xenomorphs emerge from the ducts and surround your team.

As you engage in the game, the stamina system instills a real sense of dread and atmosphere. Thematic mechanisms add meaning and subtlety to the experience, leading to a feeling of satisfaction. Sometimes the game even seems new.

A major supporting device is the “sight dial”. This round cardboard tracker activates when you shoot a weapon, representing your waning resolve as you quickly fire extra shots. It completely resets each turn, but you have to weigh whether it’s worth taking other actions, as it leaves your character less able to fire defensively during the alien activation. It’s part of a structure that over time makes the game more and more tense, even desperate. As for capturing the content of the film, that’s a great idea.

But that’s looking at it from a point of view.

Another point of view is that the endurance system is overworked. In order for Vasquez to shoot with his M65 Smart Gun, you need to remove three cards to pay the cost, then turn the aim dial to lower your aim stat, and finally roll a 10-sided die to check if your shot is successful. Then you have the option of drawing again, burning another card to repeat the process. You may need to interrupt your turn to reshuffle and reset the deck. Imagine doing this for multiple navies every turn.

Except some of these Marines won’t shoot their shotguns or pulse rifles. Instead, they’ll perform a rest action, returning cards from the “escape stack” to the bottom of the stamina deck and preserving the integrity of your troop unit. This will often be a stronger option than attack, forcing you to balance action and inaction.

So the game is almost all about manipulating the deck. This idea doesn’t seem to relate to the more thematic elements of the game, and it disengages you from the experience. Worse yet, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what the game should be.

A much stronger implementation would have seen the bridge replenish itself as a reward for taking down a large number of aliens. Release more than one with automatic fire? Hand over a card from the escape stack. It would actually have tied the incentive system more strongly to the source material and embraced the appealing aspects of the film while still retaining the thematic touchstones of the descending arc.

There’s just no shaking off the awkwardness here. This appears to be an iteration of the exhaustion system in the Kickstarter darling The 7th Continent, but a good iteration should streamline and improve, which is not happening here. This previous design required you to spend cards to pay for actions and resulted in a state of failure after you finally reworked and played the game a second time. It was clear and concise, as you only had to deal with a single draw and discard pile.

Another glorious day in the Body uses a draw pile, escape pile, and out of play discard pile. These different sets can interact in different ways and cards can refer to different costs. You also need to insert a reshuffle tile at the bottom of the draw pile to properly handle stamina restoration.

Once the exciting first impression of art and miniatures fades, the cumbersome realities of this mechanism take over. You can feel like you’re fighting a faceless enemy, fighting for direct control of the script rather than blasting xenomorphs in your face.

There are many other elements to this game. The miniatures are attractive, even if they require painful editing. The approach of using larger cardboard slabs instead of smaller modular rooms is commendable, as it dramatically cuts installation time. The campaign system is entertaining and much stronger than the unique “Bug Hunt” scenarios. The narrative of related storylines runs parallel to the film and the loss of characters is permanent. Of particular interest is the possibility for soldiers to be captured and the possibility of embarking on a side mission to save them from their new existence in a cocoon.

Some of these things are interesting; other parts are unfortunately less so. But the essence of this game, and what sets it apart from its peers, is this stamina deck. As a result, the design struggles to defend itself. Its basic mechanism has been best accomplished in The 7th Continent. Its encapsulation of Aliens‘claustrophobia was most strongly performed in 1989 with Space hulk. Even his arc of play with decaying protagonist abilities was more effective in the underrated. Claustrophobia. It’s just not the new achievement we’ve seen in other recent games like Nemesis.

What can save this game is the fact that there are surprisingly few options for fully cooperative games of this type. Most dungeon crawlers require a player to control the antagonists, a role that many don’t like. Here you and a group of friends can take on a terrifying enemy side by side.

It is also the only current tabletop miniature design to feature the Aliens intellectual property. There’s a lot of fan service, and the script repeatedly features basic stuff like “game over, man!” and “they come mostly at night … mostly”.

This may be enough for some, even if the rest of the design is derivative.