Alien Frontiers - 17 June 2015

Three Rivals at Adrian's for a game of Alien Frontiers, the dice placement/resource management game - sort of Alea Iacta Est in space.  The game mechanics are very clever and although (inevitably with a dice-based game) there is a lot of luck, the opportunities and viable tactics for scoring points keep it a close run thing.  All three of us used a different approach to accrue points but the Terraforming option (sacrificing a spaceship/die to get a colony immediately onto the planet) combined with good use of Alien Artefact cards allowed David to win out.  Final scores, David 11, James and Adrian each 9.  A very good game.

Alien Frontiers - 14 March 2012

The first (Rivals) play of Alien Frontiers, one of Adrian's Christmas games.  A lovely-looking and ingenious card and dice game.  Various strategies to try, good amounts of interaction between the players, and the exquisite agony of not quite having quite the right dice, resources or spaces on the board to pull off your killer move.

The game appeared well balanced and as James started to pull ahead, the other players could drag him back down whilst improving their scores at the same time.  Into the final round, the scores were all around the 5/6 mark but James managed to deploy his last colonies to win with 9 points, Kieron 6 with Adrian and Stuart both on 4.  A fun and cunning game, which looks to have a couple of expansions already, one of which (Factions) usefully expands the game to five players.