I never should’ve gotten on that plane
Venture into the darkness with your Alone rules & reference!
It amazes me how many games there are out there these days, and how many people are producing highly polished and complex games that manage to find an audience. Take Alone by Horrible Guild, a company I’d never heard of before. It’s competing in a very crowded market of miniature-heavy dungeon crawlers, most of which feel very similar to each other. So it needed something different to stand out.
And that difference is the flipping of the old ‘one vs many’ model (derived from roleplaying games), where one player plays the bad guys and controls the dungeon and the players each have one or more characters, to become a ‘many vs one’ model. Now there’s only one player, alone … hence the title … against several ‘evil’ players. It’s a nice idea but I’m not sure if it works that well in practice. The main problem is whether there really is enough to do for three villain players in this context. Personally, I think this game works well as a 2 player experience, and all the hoo-ha about many vs one was a bit unnecessary. But your mileage may vary!
But on to the game. This is a nicely produced and fun sci-fi horror dunegoncrawler, with the enjoyable twist that the hero can only see several corridor tiles at a time as they move about the spaceship, while the evil player has a full map of the two-level ship behind a screen. Add a screen to a game and a player will instantly hunker down behind it and plot evil (well, I do), so it’s a nice addition to the feeling of paranoia and plotting that can take over here, and the dynamic of powerful against the pretty powerless. The hero player has various goals to fulfil – the main one of course, being to stay alive – and the evil player is placing traps and beasties in their way. The twist here is that the evil player plays cards and makes actions in reaction to the hero player’s actions, but has a limited pool of cards, so that confronts them with some nice crunchy decisions about when and where to plan their attacks. There’s also a light and dark mechanic, and of course the beasties are more dangerous in the latter.
The surprisingly fun element is at the end of the turn when all the tiles are removed from the play area except for the one the hero is on, the adjacent sectors, and the lighted ones in the hero’s line of sight. Suddenly the hero player is plunged back into confusion again. Which way were they going? Where was that objective room? And what’s behind that corner …
There’s definitely enough here to set Alone apart from the usual run of dungeoncrawlers. I can understand the reluctance to just sell it as a 2-player experience, but personally I prefer that configuration, though if you have the right players it might be fun to have several of them scheming behind that screen to destroy that single hero player (even if the number of things they can all do may be stretched a bit thin).
I picked up Alone secondhand recently and I’ve been enjoying it. This is a pretty professional production for a small company and the minis are great, but there is one area where the inexperience shows, as it so often does – the rulebook. Or rulebooks in this case, because there are 3 of the damn things – an introduction book and one each for the hero and evil players. This just results in a lot of repetition and far more confusion and complexity than was necessary. Luckily, I put a lot of work into solving that problem with this rules and reference!