By appointment of "those who must be obeyed", Alex and his family stayed for a weekend at Michi's place and he brought the game with him to play it while the ladies went skating. Both Michi and Alex hadn't read the rules before, nor watched a tutorial. Therefore it was learning by reading and playing, but it went alright. The rules are complicated to read and understand, but actually the game isn't that complex.
Some minor things were new to the players, yet found cleverly solved in the end.
Much like the solo gaming variant of AvP: The hunt begins, there were spawning points which generated blips that were replaced with alien models as soon as there was a line of sight to them.
The game started relatively relaxed. There were two board tiles with blips on them. The one with Newt on it was clearly defined. That meant 3 potential aliens (possibly zero or even swarms of several creatures) on the Newt-tile and 2 on the other. Focus was to detect the Newt-blip, so Frost (Michi) stormed ahead, because he had a 2 spaces pre-move before his actions (which both could be movement of 4 spaces each as well). Soon he had line of sight to the first blip which was an alien.
Mission 1 was played. Rebecca "Newt" Jorden had to be found and guided to the exit. Several conditions were leading to potential failure as well as not securing Newt. The players knew that Newt is one of four Blips on one of the board sections. It would be only Ripley, who would be able to pick her up. Newt would flee from any Marine.
Not knowing effects of a bad choice before, Alex and Michi chose privates Hudson and Frost as player characters (which were called "heroes" and were in fact leaders in the game). Privates can only motivate one other comrade to perform his actions during the turn in the Marines phase. Higher ranks would command more soldiers. That resulted in a limited action of only four of seven Marines per turn, two of them always were privates Hudson & Frost. The latter exhausted their resources and abilities continiously while other marines stood around with full ammo and ready to fight, yet not at a place where they were useful. That was a hard lesson to learn.
Close combat was a bit odd in comparison to what the gamers were used to, but it worked out well and Frost killed the alien in the alien phase (he had failed in the Marines phase). More aliens were spawning from the spawning point at the corridor's end ahead, too.
Alex and Michi decided to move Ripley forward (green arrow) to pick up Newt (green circle) and retract the Marines who had moved to the end of the corridor to clear the area from aliens.
Meanwhile Lieutenant Gorman should move towards the exit and weld the open door shut (blue arrow) to prevent the aliens from the other tile from entering the corridor (red arrow) to have a safe path for Newt's rescue.
Two third of that plan happened to be: The aliens at the corridor end were wiped out with flamethrower bursts and Ripley took her position. Only Gorman failed miserably, much like expected by the rank and file Marines. He didn't manage to barricade the door and even failed to shoot the approaching aliens, who finally took him away to plant a chestburster into his guts or store him as food.
Alex and Michi considered the game lost for the Marines at that point, however it was cineastic and provided hours of fun and great entertainnment. It's a game that is hard to learn, but once understood, easy to play. It isn't as rich in detail as AvP: The hunt begins and abstracts alien menaces therefore. Also it's more focussed on resources and strategies, where AvP is much more tactical. However both games are equally capable of inflicting paranoia to gamers!
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