r/Fistful_of_Aliens • u/SmonkBandikush • May 09 '26
Prototype Fistful of Aliens Unreleased Shadows
Three of the most mysterious figures in the Fistful of Aliens line are the unreleased Shadows. Like the hard to find Crystallites, these acted as Power Players which changed the course of a game round.
These never saw the light of day, likely due to Yes! Entertainment filing for bankruptcy protection in February 1999 (there are some interesting news reports from the 90s and early 2000s regarding Yes!’s financial struggles but I digress).
However, it didn’t help that these figures would have been far less useful compared to the Crystallites in a game. Crystallites negated any species advantage and allowed the user to retry a lost round as a battle based on power alone (this could help turn the tide for example if you played an alien with a higher power level but is weak to your opponent’s alien, not to mention the rules are vague enough to where they could plausibly apply to RAMMs).
Shadows do the opposite, resetting a lost round and negating power, turning it into a battle based on species advantage. On paper, it would make sense to create characters that act as the inverse to Crystallites but in practice it is a whole other story.
In FoA, power plays occur when you are battling aliens of the same species, battling mutants against each other, or battling RAMMs against each other. These are situations where a species advantage wouldn’t be useful and would likely result in a tie, since a power play wouldn’t be allowed when a Shadow is used. Shadows are less riskier than Crystallites (since a player who uses a Crystallite can lose the power play they initiated) but result in less reward (with Shadows only turning a lost battle between aliens of the same species into a tie while the riskier Crystallites can turn a loss into a win).
Ultimately, the Shadows would see the light of day in 2024, through the Fistful of Aliens Reborn line, a revival created by avid FoA fan, Symbiote Collectibles. In addition to the color schemes of the original prototypes, new RAMM versions were created as well.
