Spring Clean Challenge: Every Game is Miniatures Agnostic

I seem to have an overwhelming need to model the Alien universe on the table top in as many different ways as I can. The Prodos AvP game was way too fiddly and over-engineered for my taste, and GF9’s Another Glorious Day in the Corps is…okay, I suppose. But I think we can do better, and that’s why I picked up Violent Dark, a small model count, atmospheric solo/coop sci-fi horror miniatures game that looks like it might do a good job with modeling horror action similar to the first Alien film.

Oddly enough, once I started digging into the rule book, I decided not to go the Alien route with it. The game’s suggested starting enemy is a band of rogue synthetics, which immediately called to mind MEP Miniatures’ East Wolds Robotics range, which I had a great time painting up last year. Even better, I hadn’t yet found a game to play with them.

In the course of statting up characters for the game, I found that I would need a few military and corporate types in addition to MEP’s scientists and janitors, which led to a delightful look through my collection, in some cases pulling out models I hadn’t used in years. I had a great time coming up with identities for them, and it kind of proved the whole point of this project — not only is every game miniatures-agnostic, every miniature is game-agnostic as well.

Back to the game. Violent Dark is pretty fun, and does a good job with Alien-style claustrophobic space horror. However, it’s also very fiddly, with a lot of little modifiers and other details to remember that had me flipping through the rule book throughout the game — I don’t think I’ve ever played a game more in need of a player reference sheet. But in the end I enjoyed the two scenarios I played.

Will I play it again? Possibly. The game gets the grim corporate future tone just right, and I haven’t even played the Xenos scenario yet. But I’ll definitely do up some kind of rules reference sheet if I do.