As  Winter War 20 was winding down, I ran a Sunday morning game reprising our Aliens on LV-428.  In short, the mining planet in the same system as LV-426, the site of a major motion picture in the 1980’s etc.

When the mining colony on LV-428 went dark, ten years after the previous incident, the Corporation sent a larger force of colonial marines to re-establish order at the site and determine why the miners had severed communications….

This was a narrative game using player decisions, enabled with the Gruntz 15mm Sci-fi combat rules.  We had five players, including a young lady of 12 who was playing her first miniatures game while her parents were playing in a rpg tournament.

The players are all working cooperatively and generated aliens/ blips and their start points based upon player driven die-rolls.

In summary, we had a blast – it has been a couple of years since I’ve pulled this game out, and I have to say I was pleased that it worked so well.  The players were outstanding and really liked the narrative decision making.  In the end one player got wiped out as he was stranded by large swarms in the command center (clear-domed building in the pics) and had to resort to the tunnels running beneath the compound…  many die-rolls and a couple of underground encounters later and he ran out of his last marines.  But three of the others managed to retain their ability to exit the board to the landing zone on ground/vehicles.

Two squads lost their personnel carriers in the battles around the command center and ultimately had to survive a series of die rolls to stealthily move to the elevated landing pad with the gray shuttle in the lead pic.  There they diced to see if anyone had piloting skill, and then having knocked that roll out of the park proceeded to fly around the board picking up those marines/ surviving scientists/ miners that were trapped on various rooftops around the board.

I’ll keep refining this one – I think the cooperative style, narrative gameplay and the anchor to the Aliens storyline really engaged the players – much fun was had!