I finally got both the base Alien and Predator games for Christmas and have had several goes with them each since then, and I've really been enjoying them.
I've only won a couple of two-player/two-avatar games, but none with three players yet. It definitely gets tougher the more players you add, as people had said. It's also funny how the "obvious" mistakes you spot while watching videos of other people playing suddenly become easy to make when you're playing it yourself, like forgetting about cards with a specific thing you're supposed to do on your turn.
One time a player escaped getting a face hugger on him because we forgot that revealing an event triggers the eggs, but so many cards had been played by that point that we decided to just let it slide.
From what I've played so far the Alien cards (at least for the first movie) feel a bit more powerful than the Predator ones, but there also feels like there's a big difficulty spike later on compared to Predator, which feels a bit more of an even increase in its difficulty the further into it you get. The wording is definitely a bit more ambiguous on certain cards than necessary though, like one of the Predator cards talking about 'revealing a card from the Armory and being able to play a copy of it if it's a character', despite them all being equipment, not characters, when you're playing as the Predators (after looking around on the interwebs I found that referring to that stuff as "characters" is a holdover from the Marvel games, which seems a little pointless). But thankfully that doesn't seem to crop up too often.
It feels like the key to winning with more people isn't just coordinating, but also conferring with each other about which specific cards to buy. Most of the time we were just buying whichever cards we could afford that looked good, without really paying much attention to things like class icons or which cards other players had. I can certainly imagine smarter card gaining being a big part of how you're able to be victorious more often, since we would often get to the second or third objective and then get swamped by too much stuff entering the combat zone that we just couldn't deal with.
But yeah, they're both really, really fun. I'm looking forward to playing through the rest of the movies, since I've only done about half of them so far. And it's certainly given me a new appreciation for just how tough those new "hard mode" cards in the expansion are going to be, that's for sure!
