This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: The Thing: The Boardgame
Designer: Davide Corsi & Andrea Crespi
Year: 2022
Country: Italy
Publisher: Pendragon Game Studio
The Thing: The Boardgame is based on John Carpenter’s classic scifi horror film The Thing in which the staff of an Antarctic research base attempt to deal with an alien Thing which is capable of taking on their forms, indistinguishable from a human or a dog unless subjected to very specific tests. Oddly, there are three different boardgames based on the same theme: This one, The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 and Who Goes There?
Of the three, The Thing: The Boardgame is the hardest to find. It’s difficult to find a copy on Ebay even if you’re willing to pay and the webstores of various European boardgame retailers are all sold out. I found the copy we played at the Helsinki municipal library.
The game attempts to replicate the experience of the movie very faithfully. Various mechanisms produce events familiar from the film and the win conditions mirror its end. The Thing: The Boardgame is in part a social deduction game as in the beginning, one of the players is already secretly playing for the enemy, similar to the design of games such as Battlestar Galactica and Unfathomable.
At the end, the humans win if they manage to escape in either of the helicopters or the snowcat so that only humans are abroad, and no humans were left behind. The Thing wins if a secretly infected character gets on board the escape vehicle, a human character was left behind, or if all the humans are infected or perish. At first, it seemed very difficult for the humans to win, but surprisingly in the end we managed it.
Compared to other games of this genre, The Thing: The Boardgame is surprisingly fast-paced and breezy. It has a number of bespoke mechanics simulating aspects of the storyworld but in practice they’re fast and easy to grasp. My first impression of the game was misleading, as I thought it was much more complicated than it actually was with its many subsystems and eight-phase round. Once we’d learned the rules, play proceeded quickly.
There was an interesting difference to similar games in that the process of suspecting other players of playing for the enemy team in that suspicion was supported by mechanics. There was a suspicion track, and accusing someone advances them on it. If they advance enough, they have to reveal their real loyalty: human or alien. The mechanics took away some of the paranoia but also speeded up play considerably, which felt welcome after heavier but otherwise comparable games.
In addition to planning escape, the players also needed to keep the base functioning. If the generator or the boiler room failed, or if food ran out, we’d have risked losing effectiveness from hunger or even death by freezing. One of the game’s tactical dimensions was to figure out the balance between efforts to escape and keeping the base functional.
I wish they’d make a reprint of The Thing: The Boardgame, as it would be nice to have a copy of my own!