The best Alien board games

Ravensburger’s Alien: Fate of the Nostromo is probably the first and most obvious port of call when looking for an Alien board game, as it’s literally the Alien board game. This simple cooperative board game sees players collecting items, while trying to avoid encounters with the xenomorph.

It’s pure co-op, where players will need to communicate and work together to make the most of their special abilities, and avoid coming to a grisly fate. You can’t actually die in the Alien board game, which some fans might turn their nose up, but does at least mean no one has to sit out for half a session. Instead, the team has a group morale pool, which if depleted too quickly, leads to eventual game over.

This board game has quite a casual feel, but if you’re breezing through too easily, the designer’s Director’s Cut rules can add a lot more challenge and tension back into the title.

While not an official Alien board game, Nemesis gives you a survival horror experience that feels much in line with the original film (except there are plural aliens).

It’s a co-op board game where you’ll work together, playing a bunch of unique characters with different abilities on a mission to fix up a spaceship. You’ll be searching for ammo or items, clanging about, and generally trying to avoid getting eaten by a bunch of horrible aliens.

We say co-op, but that’s not quite accurate. See, Nemesis also has elements of a social deduction board game: everyone has their own secret objective. Those could be actively helpful, like keep another character alive; fairly harmless, like steal an alien egg; or completely malevolent, like help a particular player to their grave, or be the only one to make it out safely.

Overall, Nemesis is a wonderfully thematic game, where you can throw aliens or your fellow man out of airlocks, get infected by copyright free not-chestbursters, or be covered in slime. It has lots of, quite sizeable miniatures, and loads of components, though this does drive the price up quite a bit.

A simple, Warhammer-based board game that plays like the high octane fight scenes of Aliens, Space Hulk is a two player strategy board game, where one player embodies a squad of armor-clad super soldiers, and the other a swarm of creepy-crawly aliens.

In Space Hulk 4e, the Space Marines player is vastly out-numbered, beleaguered by a horde of endlessly respawning nasties. However, they have a lot more abilities – like guns, for instance! They’ll set up overwatch on corridors to whittle foes down from range, but have the added pressure of an egg-timer on their turns, whereas the Warhammer 40k Xenos can take as long as they like.

The Genestealers players, meanwhile is trying to use their weight of numbers or ambush tactics to get up close, where they can devastate with their claws.

It’s fast dice-rolling fun. The biggest drawback to buying Space Hulk is that its already quite high price tag has only been elevated to extortionate levels on the secondary market, as it’s been out of print for years.

We’re back to official Alien board games, with the deck building game quite wordily titled Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game.

Featuring content from the first four movies of the Alien franchise, the Alien version of Legendary Encounters is a deck builder, that quite unusually is completely co-op. Players must work as a team to upgrade their decks and complete objectives, avoiding having their faces hugged or chests bursts.

Legendary Encounters: Alien is highly customisable, and functions with many different player counts. It’s a superb solo board game, but works really well with two or more players as well. One good aspect is, while the game features player elimination, it lets defeated players come back and control the bad guys.

Featuring lots of opportunities for deep thinking and cool combos, as well as some fiendishly challenging enemies, Legendary Encounters lets you mash up objectives from different movies, or combine the game with LE: Predator for some Alien vs Predator action.

One key problem concerns the game’s difficulty level. It scales dramatically with player count, so while the challenge is approachable with one or two players, with five it’s as tough as nails.

Believe it or not, Escape From the Aliens in Outer Space was the working title for Aliens, before the marketing team realized it wouldn’t fit on their posters.

In this hidden movement game, some players are slavering hungry aliens looking to eat the other players, who are tasty humans trying to reach their escape pods.

The game is played with pen and paper, with each player having a hex-grid map of the spaceship setting. The idea is for the aliens to try and move to the same space as a human, declare their presence, and eat ’em.

The humans just have to get to an unused escape pod and flee, but to do so they’ll have to cross the noisy floor. Some hexes make noise, alerting all players to your location, but not your role. Others let you fake a noise in a hex of your choosing, allowing you to terrify, trap, mislead, or evade another player.

Escape From the Aliens in Outer Space is tense and fun, with lots of opportunities for mind games, and multi-layered tactics.

This dungeon crawler board game sees one or more players raiding a base infested with aliens (controlled by another player). Level 7: Omega Protocol looks like a more complex version of Space Hulk, and that’s not too far off, but it plays a little differently.

One of the good things about this asymmetrical strategy game is how many options it gives the players. The human team can customise their squad, while the alien ‘overseer’ gets to set up different rooms the humans will encounter as they kick down doors.

One of the most innovative mechanics in Omega Protocol is the adrenaline action point system, a push and pull mechanic where the amount the commandos do in a turn directly impacts how much the overseer can do in response.

You probably don’t need both Omega Protocol and Space Hulk in your collection, no matter how much you love close and steamy encounters of the third kind, so which you opt for will depend heavily on the theme and gameplay you prefer, and which you can find for the best price.