Tech

Aliens board game is another ho-hum dungeon crawler

Ripley defending Newt.

Enlarge / Ripley defending Newt.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps is a peculiar release. Aliens, James Cameron’s follow-up to the sci-fi classic Alien is frankly one of the best action films ever made, so the excitement around this new cardboard adaptation is not surprising. The problem? We’ve seen it all before.

Aliens first received a tabletop implementation with a strong 1989 design published by Leading Edge. The spirit of the film was further embodied in Games Workshop’s classic Space Hulk, a game that was Aliens in all but name. Space Hulk influenced hundreds of tabletop dungeon crawlers since, each paying homage to their predecessors and re-wrapping that core tense experience with minute deviations.

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