X is for Xenomorphs

Seen briefly the other day, this was one of those couple-of-quid charity-shop purchases which have become an almost weekly topping-up of the collection's figure total, but - while I normally keep the figures and a couple of accessories maybe - this is staying as it is, being a rather neat little game I knew nothing about (and there's a long list of games with figures, still to find!), which can join the stack!

Peter Pan Playthings 1993's Operation Aliens board game, licensed to - or loosely based on - the second movie in the franchise, but no Newt (thankfully - pesky kids!) and a nice bunch of 1:72nd scale figures!

Or at least that's what I thought until I studied the dates? It must be off the back of the 3rd (space prison?), 4th or 5th (?) movies? I gave up watching them, it all became a little silly and Sigourney Weaver was one of the biggest names in Hollywood until she tore the arse out of the franchise she bought . . . to tare the arse out of it! In one of the ones I didn't bother-with she even did an 'Arnie' with a vat of molten stuff, but them so did that Skywalker's dad, Frodo nearly did, but at least he 'nearly' did it first!

There is a dice (or die) but the mechanism is mostly 'order' card-driven as far as I can tell, and the 'winner' table suggests the survival or escape of the space marines is a rare'ish event! This was also photographed on one of those odd days (we had one last year a swell) where the atmospheric light seems to fight with the camera's flash to produce an insipid pinkish 'glow' which doesn't make for brilliant imagery, but I suspect we'll find excuses to return to these in the future!

Close-ups, equally washed-out by the lighting conditions, but good-enough for now. You get a queen alien, four offspring and four character players; Ripley, Apone, Drake and Hicks but I can't remember which is which - I think Ripley is the yellow one? The 'baby' aliens have three heads, the mother alien has about sex or eight arms!

I've put a comparison shot on the Airfix Astronaut page (which is a better image!) and you can see they are slightly taller, only a millimeter or two, so a reasonable 1:72nd scale or a tad too small for use as 28mm role-play gaming additions.