Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps...

Listen up, Marines! Here’s the situation. The terraforming colony on exomoon LV-426, Hadley’s Hope, has unexpectedly broken contact. Weyland-Yutani Corporation, in conjunction with the Colonial Marines, is sending you to the binary system of Zeta Reticuli to find out what happened…

…but finding out what happened is not nearly as important…as surviving.

Welcome to Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps, a cooperative game from Gale Force Nine set in the world of Aliens.

You are heroes from the USS Sulaco sent to Hadley’s Hope, but it becomes clear quickly that something isn’t quite right…

The game and components

The game is broken out into missions; 3 come in the base box, with more to come in expansions. They can be played individually or as a part of an ongoing campaign that tracks your progress through the story.

Most of the components are extremely high quality the boards and tokens are made of thick cardboard and resist bending and the cards are high gloss and durable. Even if you didn’t sleeve them they feel like they’d last a while; but for the love of Hicks, sleeve them.

The miniatures are slightly finicky as they aren’t all in one piece but it’s a minor quibble as long as you’re good with crazy glue.

The game is played in two phases: Marines and Aliens, with a finish phase where you clean up and setup for the next round…unless you’re all dead, or incubators. Then you just clean up.

On their turn, marines get to do a bunch of cool things: resolve their character abilities, equip cards like guns or grenades and then take two actions.

Marines can:

Move up to their speed

Attack Aliens with a weapon

Barricade (or unbarricade) a door, spawn point, or tunnel

Aim increase the aim dial by one

Interact with something on the board

Card action makes something happen with a card you have

Rest allows you to draw cards or recycle exhausted ones

On their turn aliens will be activated, one at a time, moving and attacking if it can. There is also blip tokens, representing Aliens on the move that the heroes can’t see.

They too advance toward the Marines and spawn when a good guy gets them in line of sight. It’s particularly nasty as it can be more than one; or more than even two.

Characters can die, or even get captured. These things are less relevant if you aren’t playing in a campaign.

Killed characters are out. There’s no coming back from acid...but if a character’s captured you can go on a rescue mission; be warned, every rescue mission you undertake costs resources…resources you need to get off the planet alive.

There are currently three missions, with two more missions to come through expansions like the pictured "Get away from her you B****!"

In some ways Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps feels reminiscent to Firefly, the boardgame, also developed by GF9.

We can expect that the community, similar to Firefly, will have fun expanding the missions, or creating all new ones, altogether. Those missions may not follow canon in the way that the boxed ones do, but they'll definitely be cool.

Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps looks like a lot of fun, and is true to its source material, which is a hallmark of GF9 games.

It does look like it’s going to require a moderate level of strategy and resource management to win, though, so expect lots of tension and resource depletion as you fight your way through the tunnels, trying to punch through to daylight. One thing is for sure: not everyone is coming home alive.

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A review copy of the game was provided in advance of its release