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In the Cold War... no one cares if you scream.

With X-Com2012 out there and at least a little while before Xenonauts is ready to go, why not look to entice yet another set of games fans towards the game?

Aliens Colonial Marines is out in Feb 2013.

Now who remembers this, from the Kickstarter goals:-

Reaper (Chryssalid) Hive tileset ($40k) – in addition to the normal alien base missions, we will add Reaper (the Xenonaut equivalent of Chryssalids) Hive missions to the late-game. These would feature “nodes” that spawned infinite numbers of Reapers until destroyed. Yes, I have been playing Space Hulk.

To get you in the mood, here's a flash game based on Leading Edge's rather brilliant board game of some years ago. Xenonauts would be onto something pretty good to recreate that sort of tension for such missions.

Aliens Flash Game

Naturally, Corporal Hicks will want a nuke 'em from orbit option in there :)

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On the Kickstarter poll it finished fifth

1) Hire Level Designer (10.56)

2) Indoor Missions (10.21)

3) Soviet Town tileset (9.31)

4) Military Base tileset (9.30)

5) Reaper Hive tileset (8.78)

6) Female Soldiers (8.44)

7) Tileset-specific NPC soldiers (8.08)

8) Motion Detector (6.95)

9) Soldier Memorial Screen (6.71)

10) Vehicle Combat Experience (6.45)

11) Pilot Portraits & Callsigns (6.15)

12) Proxy Grenades (6.10)

13) Tall Grass (5.94)

14) Human Psionics & Blaster Bombs mod (5.38)

15) Mac / Linux Porting (4.57)

Pretty good, but with other tilesets finishing ahead of it, the following was announced:-

"Unfortunately, we’ve also taken out the Reaper Hive tileset. This is because all the popular stretch goals concern tilesets and we already have another four to add to the game.

We could probably just about stretch that to a maximum of six, but any more than that and the amount of work remaining would be weighted so disproportionately towards the tilesets that it’ll cause us major delays (we need to use the same artists for consistency reasons). As the Reaper Hive got the least votes of the three tilesets in the vote, that will not be included."

I seem to think Chris was quite keen on it, so should tile sets go extremely well, you just never know. Some of the other goals have proven to be flexible. But I'd not hold your breath.

On Aliens Flash/Board Game

Christ on a bike, that game is hard.

Good, isn't it? The RPG was really, really good too.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sounds like you have some experience with the original board game, how did the Alien turn work? Was it another player or a random generation/movement system? I'm a huge Aliens fan, and am sad I was only 3 when the movie and all the wonderful fun stuff came out.

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Hi Hoss,

The first interesting thing is that the aliens get to go first. No setting yourself up, or saving yourself from a previous error. It's a game where you have to think a little ahead.

So, all aliens currently present get to move 4 squares, always to the nearest marine. Note that the highest movement for a human is 3, and only a few have that.

In the first turn 4 aliens appear on the map. Their location in the board game was determined by 2 dice rolls. In subsequent turns, 2 aliens would appear, regardless of the fate of others on the board. The Flash game ups this number, I think, to make it more challenging.

On the aliens attacks, the poor marine can be killed outright, incapacitated & grabbed, wounded or grabbed, just grabbed, or if they are fortunate, can fight the alien off. Mind that acid blood if you shoot it form only a square away :)

Things not on the Flash game are the Frost rule, where you could fall over a stairwell if wounded beside one. Also, the Dietrich rule, where you had a chance of incinerating a marine in an adjacent square if you were grabbed.

It's not a game where additional rules do the marines any favours :) The Apone rule is in there. You click on the little headset in turn one and have to keep Apone there for three rounds, to get more points. This simulates him trying to communicate with Gorman after Dietrich is taken.

So, it's a great solitaire game as well as great in groups. Ideal with 1 marine player and 1 aliens player. But works very well with multiple players on the marines side. That type of game really brings out the dysfunction in the marines. Some will be terrified (a la Hudson). Some will make sure they cover their buddies (Drake & Vasquez)

A fun part of the rules were the assessment of the movie marines against the games own win system.

A win is getting 7 or more marines out in one piece, even if wounded or incapacitated.

4-6 is a draw

Less than 4 is a loss.

In the movie, Hicks, Hudson and Vasquez get out of there. So, the marines lose.

A lot of the rules were based on the old Phoenix Command system, as definitely was the Aliens RPG.

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