Legendary encounters Alien expansion from Upper Deck games

Ah Alien, and Aliens (not so much the sequels) excellent sic fi films and some of my favourites, so that should make gaming in that world good right? well yes.. and hard too, as it should be.

This is an expansion for the Legendary Encounters Alien game, so make sure you take a look at that as it will show you how it plays, and give you an idea of what this will add... in short... a lot!
More facehuggers, more ALIENS and, finally, more ALIEN QUEEN!



  • The roster of characters grows with this expansion to include Lieutenant Gorman, Superintendent Andrews, Captain Elgyn, and Kane!
  • New unique playmat to allow players to play as the ALIEN Queen!
  • 400 new cards featuring all original art.

  • All of this sounds pretty cool right? I mean I never thought I would end up wanting to be a Queen! but in this case its perfectly good fun.
    Lets pop it open, see what we get then take a look at what's new.....



     A ton of cards, new rules sheet detailing the new additions, and new hives, and that mat...
    Its the same lovely high quality mouse mat style material, with a nice helpful list of commands on it and some great art, it can really help turn your coop game into you agasint  team so its excellent for providing new variety to the game, let alone all the new characters and enemies that can just be inserted into the core game as well.

    In the Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game Expansion, one player can now take on the role of the Queen Mother, the supreme ruler of the Xenomorphs, with her own playmat, deck, and desire to destroy the Human players.
    The card art is just as high quality as the core, in some places even better, and will mix perfectly.

    The Queen Mother starts with the same kind of deck as the players, but she has her own Nest and Lair (like the humans’ Barracks and HQ) made up of four Alien characters

    During the game, the Queen Mother will recruit characters to make her deck stronger, but unlike the players she has several different ways to spend Attack.
    She can always spend Attack to optionally scan a room. (It works like a player scanning, but she doesn’t have to turn the card face up if she’d rather keep it a surprise.)

    She also has four different Keywords which “unlock” different ways for her to spend Attack that turn.
    Bite allows her to attack a player by spending Attack equal to its Defense. She gets to look at the top two cards of the Strike deck (because she has two mouths) and force the player to draw one.
    Grab allows her to steal a character from the player’s HQ by spending Attack equal to its cost.. The character goes into her discard pile (representing it getting cocooned and impregnated). When she draws it again (representing the new Xenomorph bursting from its chest), it gets placed into the Combat Zone, loses all its text, and is now an Enemy — Alien with [Attach Symbol] equal to its [Cost].
    Hunt allows her to spend Attack to discard cards with that cost or less out of the player’s hands.
    Rush allows her to add more Hive cards to the Complex.

    Not only does the Queen Mother make things harder for the players, but in order for the players to win they must not only complete all three Objectives, they must kill the Queen Mother herself. But first they have to survive to reach her.

    There are four different Queen Mother enemy cards, each describing a different characteristic of her. During setup, one is secretly selected and placed on the bottom of the Hive. Once it’s revealed, it must be fought similarly to an enemy player: You must spend Attack equal to its Defense to force it to draw Strikes.

    includes two all new Hives with stories created exclusively for this game. Each has a Location, three Objectives, and three Hive mini-decks. You can play them by themselves or mix and match them along with the original Hives so it has opened up another huge amount of replay for a game already strong with replayability.
    Is this a set worth getting if you want just to carry on play coop mode or solo? Well yes it is, the new characters and missions alone make it worthwhile, plus the addition of the Queen for some 1 vs many action as well.  They have even introduced what they call "Hard Mode" as if the game wasn't tough enough, but its another way to again provide some really solid replay value to the core set.  This game adds 400 cards... 400!! That's quite the expansion, its almost its own game, but it does add so many more options to the core that you can plug in or not as you choose, and choice is a good thing.

    So overall, more missions, more characters, more enemies, more options, and an Alien Queen? what's not to love, if you have the original core set this is pretty much a must buy.

    So what about crossover compatibility? Well... the aliens stuff has always been able to go, to a point into the marvel ones, but not one i would want to do for theme reasons myself, though i am not sure this expansion would work too well with it as you would have to adjust a lot of the terminology to get it to work.  It is doable, but not easy.   Now regarding the predator game, the designer states "If they're playing as the Humans in Predator it works fine. Just needs terminology swaps the same way as if you mixed the the two games together without Alien Queen mechanic. If they're playing as Predators it's a little more awkward because the Queen Player can't actually win the game... However, they could play as Predators cooperatively (mentioned in the Predator Rulebook) and work together to fight the Queen".

    With an RRP of £49.99 this will add a huge amount to your game, with all sorts of new goodies to explore, and of course the chance to play as the queen (never thought i would be excited by that!) so head on over to your local game store and grab yourself a pack.

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