Alien: Fate of the Nostromo

Alien: Fate of the Nostromo is from Ravensburger of Disney Villainous and Disney Lorcana and a lot of jigsaw puzzles and games for kids fame. It was like, seven or eight bucks on clearance at Target and I mean at that price how bad could the game be to not be worth the sticker price.

Alien (note: Alien, not Aliens, there are no space marines here) is famously a movie about a bunch of blue collar schmoes who get an unstoppable murder beast on their ship and get picked off by it one by one until there's just Sigourney Weaver and the cat left.

And you see the room to make a co-op board game, right? Like Betrayal at the House on the Hill, but you jump ahead to the Haunt. Everyone putting their skills together to survive. But there's a problem: Common wisdom holds that good board game design shouldn't have players picked off one by one. No one wants to die early, then sit around for an indeterminate length of time not being a participant, either looking at their phone or just being an annoying commentator on what's going on.

Win or lose, everyone should exit the game at the same time, even if that's not how your inspiration went.

And so Fate of the Nostromo is made to err on the side of game design wisdom. Rather than people getting picked off by the xenomorph, when you encounter it you're forced to flee and the Crew Morale suffers. In this game, xenomorphs have never killed anyone, their bodies just Did That because of emotional damage.

You don't even find out that you got gruesomely killed if you fail, the morale tracker just hits 0 and the game stops because of cumulative morale damage.

In the abstract, none of this is bad. It's very easy for me to envision the co-op board game where this system works out fine. Heck, honestly it would be really easy to adapt to Scooby-Doo given how famous they are for chase sequences.

But they made a game, based on a movie where characters get killed off one by one, and that calls attention to the fact that their game is wholly unlike their inspiration.

Perhaps I'm thinking of Fate of the Nostromo again after writing the post on Sorite. Where Sortie takes its inspiration and turns it into a game sublimely, Fate of the Nostromo looks on its inspiration and chooses to be unlike it in the name of game design.

However on the fair side, incorporating the cat jumpscare into the game by hiding it in the packaging of the game itself is a really clever bit of component design.