Review: One Night Ultimate Alien

• June 29, 2017
• James Skemp
• review

The following is a review of One Night Ultimate Alien, received as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Another Game in the One Night Series

The One Night Series of games consists of Werewolf, Werewolf Daybreak, Vampire, and now Alien.

Each of these games can be played by themselves, or can be combined to allow for more players and different experiences.

For gameplay, they’re very lite versions of Ultimate Werewolf, as instead of playing over the course of many nights, you effectively play one night and then figure out who, if anyone, should be killed.

The One Night games also allow all players to play, as the role of the moderator can be (and in Alien must be) played by use of a mobile app. The single app allows you to select which characters to play with, from any of the currently released sets.

Alien actually features a dynamic where spacetime warps, causing random effects to happen. This is actually pretty nice, and keeps people on their toes, but does require that you keep in mind not only your original role, but also what number you’re assigned.

The app definitely gets a high rating from me. I do wonder if years down the road, when the games are out-of-print, what effect not having the app will be, but for now I definitely like seeing more games play with using smartphones as a part of the game.

As far as the game itself … I think I play One Night wrong, and everyone I play with seems to have the same issue. With Ultimate the party dynamic is much greater, and gradually you begin to understand what roles might be played by certain players as the days go by.

With One Night, however, if no cards are switched over, and the psychic doesn’t understand their role, the game is a bit of a crapshoot. The card switching dynamic is also questionable, since with smaller groups it’s difficult to ignore if the player next to you moves a card around during the night.

Moving to the components, the cards themselves are a nice cardboard stock, which means they should get years of play without wearing thin.

Ultimately, I’d much rather be playing Ultimate Werewolf. But if I don’t have enough people for it, I think I’d rather play something else other than one of the One Night games. For this reason I’d give all of the games in the series 3 of 5 stars. If you’re a fan of the One Night games, Alien most importantly adds a nice randomness dynamic via the app, and could definitely be worth considering.

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