Legendary Encounters: An ALIEN Deckbuilding Game - Tips & Strategies

Everybody starts by playing through the movies. Then they begin to randomize the objectives and characters. This house rule will provide the next step in evolution.

Suspense is one way that this game captures the feel of the films. Once you start to learn the cardpool, you will know what threats each Objective will bring and which cards are best to recruit to deal with them. A player with deck-building experience will draft cards to help during the third Objective long before it becomes pertinent. Using hidden Objectives will help bring back some of the surprises.

Stack each Objective 3 pile facedown on the table with the grey Objective card on top of the corresponding Hive cards. Have two different players move these stacks around to randomize and eliminate tracking. Select one stack. Place the Objective card facedown on the Objective stack space. Add the appropriate drone cards to the Hive cards, shuffle and place them on the Hive stack space. Do this same process for Objectives 2 and 1. Choose your characters and reveal the 1st Objective only when you are ready to begin the game. Don’t show any of the future Objectives until the previous one is completed.

This method will help keep some tension in the game and should extend the replay value.

Pay attention to the character symbols on the Coordinate cards you pick up from HQ. You should try to procure symbols that match effects in your teammates decks, since the cards will play on their turns more often than on yours. Leave the ones that match your deck for them to buy.

Some objective sets have Facehuggers ready to spring out once you scan them. One location will insert a few into the Barracks for some nasty surprises. When they appear, the current player can save themselves or the very next player can help. If both are unable to help, the unlucky discoverer will become impregnated and almost inevitably doomed.

When faced with situations where Facehugger attacks are increased, avoid actions that may discover them unless you, or the next player, have 3 spare attack points. Don’t be poking around (ala Kane in Alien!) unless you can deal with a surprise visitor on your nose. So if you have 6 attack and plan on killing a xenomorph, then scanning after, just do your scans first to be safe. If you only have 3 attack and the guy behind you has 2, you may be better off wasting value rather than taking a risk of gaining a parasitic cuddler. When there are Huggers in the Barracks, recruit cards first, and only if you have 3 attack. Holding back will result in an obvious loss of efficiency, but the extra caution will keep the team at full capacity, ultimately benefitting the group.

There are numerous inexpensive cards that allow you to scan a location for free. These are extremely important because they allow you to see a target without reducing your ability to eliminate it. This buys you more time which in turn allows you to strengthen your deck which gives you a better shot at victory.

When introducing this game to new people, it can be especially frustrating to be knocked out early by an unfortunate face hugger transforming into a chestburster. We allow everyone 9 recruit points to spend toward any card they want out of the character deck or sergeant pile and discard that many grunts/specialists from their starting hand. It gets the game going faster and lets everyone get a feel for the mission. After the first playthrough, win or lose, we rebuild the starting hands according to the games rules and play for real.

Each Avatar has a card that gets shuffled into your deck. This card has a symbol under the movie icon in the top left corner. Pay attention to your symbol! It’ll be either “leadership”, “Tech”, “Medic”, or a green fist (my wife calls it the hulk hand) while you’re recruiting you can gain other cards with this symbol that will grant you abilities like drawing more cards or, in the case of the power loader, keep a card in play while you discard the rest of your hand. This can be the difference between winning and losing a scenario. The power loader is a necessity for the Aliens scenario so you’ll want the player with the most “hulk hand” symbols in their deck to be the one to recruit it so they can keep it in play.