Aliens allows players to recreate three key battle scenarios from the 1986 science fiction/horror film. The scenarios include "The Reactor Room" (nine marines vs. the aliens in their lair), "Operations and Air Ducts" (the surviving marines face an alien assault and pursuit), and "Ripley vs. The Queen" (Ripley uses a powerloader in her final battle with the Alien Queen). Includes a 17" x 34" game map, character cards, and counters, all featuring photos from the movie.
Marines can have very short life spans in this game, especially if they don't work together. Game play is fast and intense - does a good job of creating the sense of urgency felt when watching the movie.Missions can be made more brutal with optional rules - plus some rule variants add to some fun "what if" scenarios. Add the Aliens Expansion and you can virtually re-write the entire movie script!
Aliens – “Alien Metamorphosis: Variant Rules for Aliens” (variant) Stuart K. Tucker. Variant rules adding hasty shot capabilities, changes to grenade effects, adds the impact of carrying wounded marines on shooting, new weapon handling and movement rules, and changes to the Reactor Room scenario.
This is a copy of "The General" magazine article by Stuart K. Tucker (May 1995) which provides a nice set of variant rules including Hasty Shots, penalties when Carrying Marines, changes to Grenade Effects, weapon reload costs, movement sequence and thematic improvements to the scenarios (The General magazines are now in the public domain).
My first attempt at a expandable board for the game. Have put numbers on to allow for alien drops, and maybe we could work some rules around it.
Now just need to look at how I can make convincing hive encrustation to make some hive tiles...
Let me know what you think...
This is a great game, but even in the original rules some rules were not described properly (or at all). For instance there were many grey areas on carrying Incapacitated Marines, the Movie Scenario that was laid out by Leading Edge was also weak. And while the ammo restriction rule was a good idea the constant paperwork was a pain and it never really came into play unless you had a bunch of foolish Marines just standing around firing at everything possible (if Marines are doing this they will probably die anyway, so what's the point of keeping track of their ammo).
My rules 2.0 version is titled THIS TIME IT'S WAR, these rules simply take all the original rules (and some optional rules) and bring them together in a simple precise concise order. Also a VERY detailed movie scenario...
This file is the rules summary that came with the original game and was intended to be used with the original rulebook. The contents are here in pdf format.
This file is an adaptation from the original rulebook and presents those contents in pdf format. This file contains everything from the original rules that came with the game.