Alien vs Predator: The Hunt Begins (2nd Edition) Review

When you hear Aliens vs. Predator your mind likely goes to an unsafe place. That place where you've filed away the mound of fecal matter that consists of a few films, comics and other media cobbled together from elements of two otherwise quality franchises. You can count the good movies sprung from these two entities on Mrs. Gerder's left hand. That would be my elementary school lunch-lady who lost a finger in a garbage disposal.

So how could a licensed board game out of Poland stand half a chance with such a disreputable brand name? I don't know, but this game is as solid as a "Game Over!" or "Get to tha choppa!" quote. That's pretty damn solid in my book.

In case you missed it, last year Pete wrote a great review on the first edition of this game. He laid out his criticisms eloquently and nailed the strong elements. Luckily, publisher Prodos put their heads down and got to work on the second edition while taking their lumps. Maybe they read Pete's review and took heart, who knows.

The first large change here is a revised ruleset that cleans up much of the wording and streamlines a great deal. This is a complicated three-way competitive dungeon crawler with a few layers of rules. Its wargame ancestry creeps in at times and the designers were not afraid to embrace detailed granular mechanisms. Some of those bloated chunks have been burned to a shriveled pulp by a phantom trigger happy Ripley.

Choices such as removing the half-infested alien tiles, changing everything to single piece miniatures, and simplifying many abilities are all positive. There's less book-keeping and extraneous vestigial components to worry about. The balance has also been cleaned up producing smoother play. All of this tidying really ties the product together into a more professional feature. One this license deserves-at least when judged by the contents of Mrs. Gerder's digits.

In your basement, your entire house can hear you scream.

The component quality here is excellent. The new sculpts are fantastic and boast great detail for plastic board game miniatures. Graphic design and tile art also add a large degree of atmosphere. Everything feels like it's marching in unison towards a larger goal.

The love triangle setup is intriguing and unlike any other dudes in a corridor you've seen before. The magic here is in the asymmetry of abilities and style. Each feels distinct and more importantly, fun. The marines are chock-full of personality as you wield smart guns and flame throwers to burn out the xeno scum. The Aliens hit en masse with large numbers, spilling their acid blood and rending limb from limb. The Predators slice you with fierce combi-sticks and smart discs that bound around corners.

This asymmetry is wielded skillfully with the excellent scenarios presented. They push for maximum interaction and require the cutting off and defending from each of your enemies. There's a delicate symbiosis manufactured from the objectives that require you block your opponents as well as aggressively pursue your own interests. The playtesting and refinement bleeds through like a splash of acid on the Nostromo's deck.

When you take an interesting degree of asymmetry and funnel it through the maw of solid scenario design, you get wonderful narrative outcomes. Those moments where your marine squad pushes into a side corridor and makes the tough decision to weld the door shut. When you hear your smart gunner's muffled scream on the other side your heart is crushed, but at least the other four jabronis in your gang are still alive.

Then you run right into a Predator who guts the first two to step forward. You light him up with the flamer and hit him with a grenade but he just won't fall. The warning klaxons are firing and no one cares that your team's been reduced to a bag of flapping skin.

Stuck between a Predator and a hard place.

Yeah, those totally awesome moments are fortunately pretty common. They're birthed through that sometimes difficult level of detail the rules espouse and the combination of special abilities that collide. They're heightened by the faction specific card play and unique strategies.

This is definitely a very random game leaning on its miniature skirmish DNA. You're rolling 20-siders to hit, make armor saves, and occasionally dodge. Card play can boost the odds slightly but often feels minimal and you're nudging the percentages just slightly. All of these randomized outputs produce moments of unexpected glory, but they also highlight the fragility of the situation. Some games a single Alien stalker will shrug off three plasma caster shots and then get a series of lucky strikes in on its foe. Others your Marine flank will collapse early from a poor series of rolls and the game will be over nearly before it started. These are fantastic story moments, but the randomness can feel extremely disheartening for those not ready to embrace the chaos.

Amidst those moments of extremity you're also peppered with occasional challenges. Those periods where your brain begins to wonder whether you're trapped in a quiet jungle with Adrian Brody as opposed to an abandoned mining colony with Bill Paxton.

Those first hang-ups arrive in the early days. You'll struggle with the rules as there is a lot to grok despite the streamlining. Elements like overfilling a corridor with too many units and the slightly complex turn structure throw you off your game. The lack of player aids really cements the difficulty and will have you clawing through the book a little too often.

Then there's those glorious expansions. Dozens of options such as adding an Alien Queen and Facehuggers. Or how about one of those power loader mechs? You can even toss in Predator Hellhounds which are these dogs that have spikes shooting out of their body like a goth who took the whole thing too far.

The problem isn't that these require assembly; it's more so that these expansions are of noticeably larger scale than the 2nd edition base game miniatures. Perhaps the plastic molds shrunk in transition from the masters to finished product? We don't really know but mixing the two can produce odd results. It doesn't help that the bases for the expansion miniatures are larger as well.

There's further weirdness in that you use face down ping tokens that keep figures hidden until they are spotted. The thickness of the expansion tokens are clearly different than those in the core game and easily identified. The end result is a pervasive unprofessional tone.

They do toss you a femur by including the full stat lines and special abilities of all current expansion units in the rule-book. This allows you to integrate them right away with a point buy structure and possibly using proxies. The manual as a whole is packed full of additional content including a campaign mode and decent solo scenario. It's definitely the type of property that is comfortable being tinkered with and can provide a great deal of bang for a comparatively low buck.

That quality of cramming in tons of features in combination with a very intriguing narrative-focused system results in my ability to forgive Alien vs. Predator's faults. The Hunt Begins (2nd edition) is certainly not perfect, but a game that allows me to burn down a room full of Aliens, engage a Yuatja in hand to hand, and then die to a skittering Facehugger-that's perfectly sublime.