Legendary Encounters review

 

Legendary Encounters is a deck building game based on the four Alien movies that use

the Upper Deck Marvel Legendary card game mechanics.  The players pick an avatar out of a list of Alien movies archetypes (scientists, gunner, synthetic, corporate executive, scout, priest, mercenary, etc.) and use recruit points to gain new cards and strike points to defeat xenomorphs.  It can support solo play and is tense at time and exciting.

Each game uses a hive deck built from a selection of cards from a specific part of the Alien movies.  Theses mini decks contain enemies, objectives, events, hazards and every once in a great while an ally.  The mini deck is connected to an objective card that tells the players what they need to accomplish in order to complete the objective.  Players are working cooperatively against this hive deck to beat the game.

Each card that enters play from the hive deck is face down and you need to spend strike points to scan the room in the complex to flip over the hive card.  Many cards have a when revealed action, making the simple act of scanning somewhat risky.  You need to scan the hive cards to get objectives and to find those rare allies (like Jonesy the cat.)

If a hive card makes it through the complex without being scanned it drops down into the combat zone and is revealed.  Any monsters in the combat zone deal damage to the current player.  Too many monsters in the zone can spell certain doom.

You use recruit points to gain more powerful cards (aka character cards)  for your deck from the barracks.  These cards give you more strike and recruit points.  There doesn’t seem to be too many deck management cards in this game.  There are a few ways to get rid of your low powered starting cards, but I seem to end the game with a mitt full of grunts and specialists.  Recruited cards have powers associated with one of the classes or the card families.  Card families are aligned with the movie characters.  The first slate of character cards are all marked with the Weyland-Yutani logo.  There are many character cards that will do something extra if you previously played a Weyland-Yutani card.

Classes work the same way.  There are several classes (leadership, intel, survival, etc.) and some character cards will include extra actions that trigger of a previously played card.  This idea of card combination is neat.  I have played my test games as the synthetic who has card with all the class icons making it very versatile.  Other avatars need to play closer attention to which classes are required to trigger actions on cards they gain.

One of the game mechanics that is lost in solo play is the coordinate ability.  Many cards in the character deck and the sergeant cards allow a players to help the current player by lending recruit or strike points.  As a solo player the coordinate keyword is fairly meaningless.

I have only made it to the second game.  I tried the game on easy difficulty the first time and won.  Easy difficulty allows you a free turn to recruit before the have deck starts pushing badness into the complex.  The last three games I’ve tried to start without the freebie turn and each one has turned out bad.

This is a fun game that creates mystery and excitement akin to the original movies.