The Thing board game offers you too many sad, cold and lonely ways to die
John Carpenter’s 1982 film The thing ends with the few remaining characters in a desperate place. Faced with an alien that can infect, assimilate, and mimic human bodies, the survivors are left unsure which of them is secretly an alien, or whether their pyrrhic efforts have eliminated the infection. They are stranded in Antarctica and their research base is destroyed. Their resources are gone, there is no longer any meaningful shelter, they are freezing to death, and they can’t even trust each other enough to work together.
Sounds fun, right? Fancy something you can’t wait to experience for yourself?
Just like the 2022 board game version of the classic gang war movie The warriors, The board game from Pendragon Game Studio The thing aims to recreate the plot and atmosphere of a movie for a group of players who enjoy a punishing challenge and an oppressive situation. Started in 2022 Now available in stores for the first time, the game combines elements from a variety of well-known board games, but the accumulation of elements makes it surprisingly difficult for characters to survive. There are many ways to lose this game, and only a few fairly unlikely ways to win. That means threading the needle and achieving a victory feels particularly fantastic – but in game after game, our playtesters failed early, died messily, and became deeply frustrated by The thing.
Image: Pendragon Game Studio
There are two main modes for the base game. In the four-to-eight player version, one player starts as the lone secret alien running around the Antarctic research base using cards to secretly sabotage collaborative projects (a dynamic familiar from games like The Resistance: Avalon And Secret Hitler) and infect the human scientists. Another version, for one to three players, simplifies the action, eliminating the traitor mechanic and replacing it with a much simpler dice mechanic. That makes it easier to progress quickly, but this version of the game can be even harder to win.
New players can expect a steep learning curve. There are eight stages in each game round, and unlike most similarly complicated games, The thing doesn’t provide players with a map or guide to help them keep track of what’s happening when: The designated leader gets a phase guide each round, but that’s it. It takes a while to understand all the action options, such as preparing food in the kitchen, going to the medical laboratory for DNA testing kits, refueling fuel in the boiler room and electrical room, and so on, because there are so many choices and different rules . for every room. And as many previous players noted after the Kickstarter-funded version came out, the game rules are ambiguous and sometimes difficult to follow.
Once players know the game and have decided how to handle their rules questions, The thing can be a lively, tense, make-or-break experience. The most ingenious part of the game is built around all these tasks: there’s a clever tension between the risks and the incentives as you choose whether to do them together or alone.
For example, several players assembling the sabotaged radio room significantly speeds up the process, increasing the chance you’ll be able to call for help. But every encounter with another player in the same room allows you to become infected and assimilated by the alien. Even if you survive a seemingly harmless group project, every encounter with someone else puts you on the ‘suspicion trail’, complicating your life.
And it’s complicated enough as it is. The thing is almost comically stacked against the players, who have more crucial tasks each round than can possibly be accomplished, even with eight players. Every task you skip will result in penalties and setbacks as the base is destroyed and the alien infection spreads undetected. The game’s biggest flaw, however, is the randomly determined and punishingly high failure rate for those tasks. The game hardly needs an infiltrating alien to increase the threat level, as trying to keep the heat and lights on and find an escape route is a Herculean task in itself.
That’s the baffling thing about it The thing‘s play design. The many survival tasks to be completed suggest a longer, deeper game in which players wage a retreating battle against the elements, as they prepare to battle the alien and gather information about who they can and cannot trust. . It feels like it’s meant to be in the spirit of other long-playing traitor mechanical resource management games, such as Battlestar Galactica or Shadows over Camelot.
But in playtest after playtest, with different groups of players trying different strategies and priorities, I rarely saw the survivors last long enough to gain meaningful information about each other’s secret identities. A few bad card draws or dice rolls can cause the base to fall apart before the alien contagion has even spread meaningfully. Man’s only advantage is that when he exposes an alien, it rarely poses a significant threat compared to the entropy taking over the base. Exposed aliens are weak and have limited options aside from speeding up the game’s progress. But every now and then, with a good guess, an alien can take another player out of the game entirely, in a mechanism guaranteed to anger some participants.
The problem here is that in secret role-playing games, the tension usually comes from watching the behavior of others and trying to figure out the identity of the traitor. In The thing, identifying the infected is an absolute must for the endgame, in which the escaping humans will immediately lose if they rescue a secret alien or accidentally abandon a fellow human. And yet the human players have a ridiculously low chance of actually detecting aliens because there are so many limitations to their testing abilities, from the high test failure rate to the limits on who they can check and how many checks they can make per round.
The penalty for doing it wrong is draconian: you can effectively manage your resources for the entire game and still lose with a single wrong guess about information the game never allowed you to gather. An expansion, The thing: Norwegian outpostwhich requires the base game to play, lets players similarly approach the action of the 2011 prequel film, also titled The thingand the ruleset is friendlier in this one respect, at least – in Norwegian outpostpeople can escape alone, without having to save everyone else to win.
The all-or-nothing stakes feel appropriate for the 1982 film, in which the human characters face an unknown and ever-growing threat in a deadly environment. However, experiencing a viciously uneven horror film is not necessarily enjoyable. The thing it feels like it’s only designed for people who want exactly that experience: the opportunity to test their wits in a blatantly unbalanced scenario where they have surprisingly little chance of winning, and an intimidating number of ways to die.
