Aliens Bug Hunt: A scifi dungeon crawler

In space, no one can hear your dice rolls.

So you have this itch to go for a little bug hunt, do ya? Well marine, its time to make your day! Get out of that APC and better be ready to kick some ass, sunshine! Because this outpost is full of xenomorph activity!

Yes thats the story of ABH: you and your crew from the movie Aliens (as this board game is a licensed product) get to accomplish different missions in a bug infested outpost. Luckily your squad is full of marines, guns and ammo! 

I play almost exclusively solo, so this review is about my private experience with the game. There is no "special" solo mode here, since it is a coop game, and you simply play for 2 characters. This is not a problem, because the deck of command cards is shuffled together, no matter how many characters you control - you can play solo even all four! 

So the main goal is to accomplish randomly chosen mission. The acquired mission tokens give you special possibilities to make influence on the game flow, for example the "core reactor melting" will skip the phase when aliens move and attack AND spawn, which is very very helpful. Unfortunately you can use this only 3 times max, and first you have to get those 3 tokens. 

The fighting is very well done: you "shoot" by throwing 1 alien die per alien. On a black you kill, on a red you are injured, on a white claw marker you miss and the alien misses too. Simple, working well. There is some room for strategy, as each hero has some special ability, like shooting with bonuses if standing next room to the enemy. So your team members can support each other different ways.

There is of course a time pressure element here, to make you feel the sense of permanent danger. The spawned aliens move forward to the complex exit, and if too many escapes, its "Game over man, game over!" 

The core of the game mechanics is navigating trough randomly generated corridors (tiles) and discovering new threats and/or mission tokens, plus destroying barricades for easier movement. This way you have a feeling of running trough a space dungeon, sort of :) 

And its hell of a feeling! Really makes you want to play again and again. I can imagine with friends this can be the ideal friday night party game!

5 stars out of 5 for the fun, the components (comes with 4 hero miniatures, lots of hard wooden tiles, counters, cards and dice, and the way how it is done.

PS: The game was kindly sent to me from

ludopolis.eu (for the SK homepage: ludopolis.sk )