AVP: the girl's first game and new tiles for the board

I took the enlarged board game version to a friend's house yesterday since we had planned to have an evening of board gaming after dinner. After playing several rounds of another game, the girls decided they wanted to try Aliens. They already knew about my tabletop game related projects, so they were eager to find out why I am so excited about this game in particular. I had brought my larger tiles and my miniatures, gave the girls a short briefing about weapons, goals of the "Reactor Room" scenario and then had them decide who is going to control which character.
The two had split their forces into one of them controlling Dietrich, Apone, Hudson and Drake and the other Wierzbowski, Frost, Crowe, Hicks and Vasquez. They also set up the Marines in that order to take actions.

We played the basic scenario without ammo restrictions, without third-Alien- per-round spawns, but with the bonus bug rules. I have to say the two girls are die-hard Sci-Fi fans and have a lot of knowledge about the Alien universe - which is a rare thing to begin with (girls that know what's a Pulse Rifle?!). It turned out they were adopting to Aliens spawns immediately, knew when to put what weapon into use to kill which Alien to minimize Acid Spray casualties etc after two or three rounds!! Guess what these two managed: they rescued ALL (!!!) Marines in their first game of Aliens ever. Drake kicked three Xenomorph butts in Melee during that game, Dietrich got wounded in Close Combat by an Alien but  Apone kicked it off her and engulfed it in flames with his last action. Hicks had to rescue the incapacitated Wierzbowski and ran back to grab him, carried him back towards the exit, with Vasquez ripping everything apart that the Hive was sending at them.

The girls loved that game. I was told I need to bring back the board on Wednesday - they want to continue the campaign. I am a happy man. I have a gaming group of girls only that share men's hobbies. :-) :-) Now, they had Dietrich wounded and Wierzbowski Incapacitated - shouldn't be much of a hassle since their status turns better by one before the next mission.

This is where the latest project kicks in: in between "Reactor Room" and "Operations" the expanded director's cut of Aliens had the sentry guns shredding Alien waves in the hallways. Thanks to a guy I met in another forum (hi, Michael!), I got a map for exactly this scenario. You can see it below:

The sentry gun scenario map.

Furthermore, I also have the Expansion Pack map pack now. Enlarged version looks like this:

The enlarged Expansion Pack map.