Review Details

Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game

Product Review (submitted on October 6, 2016):

Solid cooperative game that includes several options to adjust difficulty higher or lower. Would recommend at least 3 players but 2 players works well enough and you could play 2 characters solo as well.

I'm a big Alien series fan and I have to say this is one of the best cases of gameplay matching theme I've seen in a board game. It definitely is a tense experience full of surprises. Each scenario is based on one of the movies and each one of them fits their movie well. Flavor text taken from the movies is also an enjoyable touch. Often you win by the skin of your teeth or have huge strokes of luck washed away by a couple of bad turns as everything unravels. Yet my brothers and I found we felt that better decisions earlier in the game could have prevented these random disasters.

Gameplay involves playing cards to build up your deck of characters or using attack to kill enemies or reveal upcoming cards. Most things can be prevented but some things can't which leads to a tension where you don't want to see what's next but you know you have to move forward. A lot of cards can be used to help allies adding a team conscious element to decisions. Neat combo system encourages players to take different styles of play and fill different roles. Definately I game you explore and not spoil every card before playing.

Only downsides are the quality of the cards, bizarre organization when unboxing, and the inconsistent artwork. Definately buy sleeves and organize before your first play. Also, some of the artwork has violent content that some parents may not want children to see (but then again this is Alien).

Final suggestions: If you like Alien, you'll enjoy this theme. It does the films justice. Resist the urge to spoil the cards before playthrough. Read the role cards but only read the deck location for the rest of the cards. Excellent team game with lots of replay ability.