Ares Games | The Thing: The Board Game | Horror Board Game | Ages 13+ | 1-8 Players | 60+ Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

On the map are the same rooms as seen in the film, and each of these rooms allows players to perform a different action. Human players have to feed themselves and keep the boiler and the generator on to avoid being in the cold and dark. The Thing will try to sabotage these places to make life difficult for humans...or not, trying to camouflage itself among the humans and infect them when the perfect opportunity presents itself.

Finally we have the dog movement phase where the adorable husky miniatures move around the board based on location cards. These pesky canines can be a problem for two reasons. If a character is alone with a dog in a room they draw from an infected bag and have a small chance of being secretly infected. The other reason is that if a revealed alien finds itself in a room with a husky, it will consume it and grow in strength!

Thematically, I can now see what encouraged the designer of this game to choose this film and specifically this location for a game like this. The sense of isolation adds to the game. There is no help coming, and you need to get out to survive. It works perfectly with a hidden character game and helps develop the sense of uncertainty in every decision, and ultimately, the fun the game brings to the table. I love how players can be elected to be the leader of the group. It can give you a great sense of duty and control over the game,. Deciding how to distribute the action cards to various locations while keeping an eye on where players are moving to. It’s even more fun if you are secretly an alien player. Watching everyone squabble and argue over why that player moved to a location or why they did something the last turn. What I love here though is that each character has an ability balanced enough and thematic to their character. Clark is the dog handler so he can ignore the dogs ability to infect him. Nauls is the cook and can use fewer food tokens when managing the kitchen area. Having these abilities gave the game a lot more replay value for me and allowed for some fun combinations of characters. At the end of each round if players have acquired the right components blood tests can be used to determine someone’s allegiance and could be used to force a player to reveal as an alien. However, the revealed alien may do more damage once they’re in the open. The humans can run out of food in the base and begin starving. When the base runs out of food, every player’s hand size is reduced by one, but players didn’t seem too hampered by this limitation. The power can fail and create darkness. In the dark, players must randomly turn in their action cards the leader rather than choosing. This also didn’t feel debilitating. Eventually in several games we ended up being both starving and in darkness, and yet the humans soldiered on without seeing too much change. I did stop making fun of Norris as his special power is to have a flashlight. I’m sorry Norris, your character power is much better than I originally thought. The alien can win by either infecting everyone, or boarding the chosen escape method, they’ve managed to get out into the world and spread!

Gamer Network Limited, Gateway House, 28 The Quadrant, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1DN, United Kingdom, registered under company number 03882481. Usually, another player has been quietly setting up arguments and accusations. If they managed to creep their way onto the Helicopter to win the game for the Imitations, when everyone was convinced of their innocence… well, this is what hidden character games are all about and what games like this are made for. The Thing: Alien miniatures expansion contains a set of four highly detailed character miniatures, to use in place of the Alien standees you can find into the base game box. The Thing is a semi co-operative game and this means that despite working together, some of you may have alternate agendas.The Thing: The Board Game is being published by Pendragon Game Studio, the company behind the 2016 hidden movement game Last Friday, inspired by the genre of slasher films made popular during the 1980s. Co-designing the game are Giuseppe Cicero and Andrea Crespi, co-creator of Potion Explosion and survival horror game Alone. In addition to these elements, players also have to manage Outpost 31. On the map are the same rooms as seen in the film, and each of these rooms allows players to perform a different action. Human players have to feed themselves and keep the boiler and the generator on to avoid being in the cold and dark. The Thing will try to sabotage these places to make life difficult for humans...or not, trying to camouflage itself among the humans and infect them when the perfect opportunity presents itself.

The tension as you all decide who to perform a blood test on and then waiting for them to reveal their role card is unmatched in any game I have played.

If you manage to defeat The Thing in battle, you will move onto the second section, which increases your chance of being infected. More Blood sample cards are dealt out to all players as you open your crew up to a wider area of the base. This gives a second or third player the chance to become an imitation, making each decision for building a crew, mission and battle even harder. In the final third section when you defeat the Thing, then will move onto the final escape attempt on the helicopter. Table Talk A selected leader will then shuffle and one at a time reveal the action cards, then decide where to apply these at the locations. The cards consist of use, repair or sabotage. Use lets you perform area actions like supply a room or draw an item card. Repair allows you to fix broken areas of the base. Sabotage will damages areas, resulting in escape methods becoming inaccessible. Full disclosure: The Thing (1982) is my favorite horror movie, and I realize that I get a lot more out of this theme than other people. I have always loved the way the movie spreads fear and suspicion, and this has led me down a dark path of playing a lot of social deduction games. The Thing – The Boardgame is an intense game experience for 1-8 players based on the 1982 cult movie, mixing different mechanics to create an experience faithful to the mood of the original film. It’s a “hidden roles” game, in which one player is initially the Thing and the other players are humans. The purpose of the Thing is to infect others, to prevent the survivors from escaping from the base (which can happen in three different ways), or to try to escape with them by behaving as a human. Players must cooperate to survive – but who is really on their side? And if they reveal The Thing – are they ready to fight it? The road to victory is truly hard, but not impossible.