Recently, my daughter has really enjoyed playing AVP: The Hunt Begins with me, and at the request of one of the regular visitors to my blog, I decided to record the game and do a little bit of an AAR/Batt-rep. I recently discovered that we had been making a few rules mistakes, which I hopefully have hammered out. That said, there were still a few rules hiccups here and there... Namely, I always seem to forget the modifiers for the marines/aliens that get granted by tiles. Just keep that in mind while you read, I've done the best I could to get the rules down, given the slightly confusing layout of the rulebook. Also note, that the game comes with faction-specific strategy cards, meant to add further bonuses and modifiers, but seeing as my opponent is 6 years old, and reading isn't her strongest suite, we've not been using them in our games. Anyway, on with the report!
So, here's our set up. My daughter (playing as the Aliens) placed 16 hidden PING tokens on the board, with 8 in the Hibernation Chamber (or "Hatchery" as I like to think of it) and 8 in the Escape Pod. She had 5 Stalkers and 11 infants total. I placed my 5 marines on the bridge. I had 1 smart gun, 1 flamethrower, 2 with pulse rifles and 1 with a pulse rifle and scanner. We flipped objective cards next. Her objective was to destroy the bridge (or maybe just the comms?) and we marked the room with an objective token, while I had to drag a bomb down to the "hatchery". This was also one of the first hang ups in the game, my objective literally read "Target tile. Deliver" and after reading through the missions, and coming up short on what exactly that meant, I decided to just play it out as I mentioned. Honestly, I've only had the objective comes into play once, so I figured it wouldn't matter anyway. Also note, we started with a hatch located to the left of the bridge, which we took out at the start of the game. Reason being, I could pop out of the hath, and start firing upon 1/2 her army right away, which didn't seem very fun, plus it would give her a straight path to her objective, which also didn't seem very fun either! With all that finished, we started our game!
