Ravensburger made a pretty great announcement yesterday to celebrate Alien Day 2021; they are releasing a brand new board game that will allow fans to play through Ridley Scott's smash hit 1979 sci-fi horror with the opportunity of re-writing the events of the film.
The board game, Alien: Fate of The Nostromo, was announced via io9 yesterday and is described as 'a collaborative, strategy-based, thriller board game that makes anywhere from one to five players members of the Nostromo crew." The main object of the game is to work together to survive and escape the doomed Nostromo before the Xenomorph kills them. Either everyone wins, or everyone loses, and each can be accomplished in several different ways.
Board game fans will find the basic gameplay of Alien: Fate of the Nostromo very familiar. Using a board that’s designed to replicate the layout of the famous ship, each player chooses a character token and mat. Using those, they’ll complete assigned objectives using a certain amount of actions per turn. Eventually, when each player completes their objective (while hopefully avoiding the killer alien running around), everyone teams up for one ultimate final mission, which will decide the fate of the Nostromo.
You and your friends will have the opportunity to basically play through the film as Ripley, Dallas, Lambert, Parker and Brett with each character being unique and offering different things for the players.
"We wanted to have each of the player characters represent their personalities in some way. So, for example, one of my favourites is Brett. He’s the engineer and so it costs him one resource less to craft things because he’s the guy that’s crafting things in the movie anyway.” - Scott Rogers (Alien: Fate of the Nostromo Designer)
The iconic monster from the film is an AI character driven by cards and tokens, can’t be defeated. At least not until the very end. You just have to hope to avoid the many places it pops up, or survive the deadly encounters, and that’s where much of the actual scares come into play.
The game's designer Scott Rogers went on to explain they wanted to "give our players the thrill of victory against a foe that otherwise would just wipe them out. But that said, you can get wiped out by the alien, so don’t go into this game thinking it’s going to be a breeze.”
"The goal is to play the movie. I wanted to make sure that that thrill and that tension that is so amazing in the film, why we still love the film to this day, was represented [and] given justice in the game. So, of course, the goal is to create these moments of tension as you are hustling through the Nostromo to get the heck out of there as this murderous creature is wandering the halls and the air vents and whatnot.”
“The thing that I thought was scary about the alien in both the film and the game design is the unpredictability of it. You never know where it’s going to show up. It’s always going to be kind of a surprise. And then when it’s out, you’re like, ‘I don’t want to be anywhere near this thing. I want to get as far away as possible.’”
“All the items you are collecting, the types of objectives you are doing, the finales of the game, are all based on things in the film. For example, one of the objectives is get to the Narcissus, the shuttlecraft, and get the heck out of there. But another one might be ‘Let’s blow it out of the airlock to try to get rid of it,” which is a line that Dallas says ... And so even though that’s just almost like a throwaway line in the film, it became the foundation of one of the endings of the game. So it’s a little bit like ‘What if?’ You look at all the things that are presented in the film and you say, ‘Well, what if that was an actual ending that the player could do during the game?’”
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