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

£9.9£99Clearance
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I have had countless games where seemingly innocent actions by players can raise eyebrows and motivations were often questioned. Put the remaining Smoke/Fire tokens, ‘Power Out/Room Destroyed’ cards, item cards, and dice within reach of all players. Now, the really important bit. It’s time to decide who is good, and who is bad. 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 Thing - The Boardgame is an intense game experience for 1-8 players based on the 1982 cult movie directed by John Carpenter. It is a game that mixes different mechanics to create an experience that is as faithful as possible to that of the original film.

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.

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Though the leader, weapons, and the revealed alien player were the mechanics our group placed at the center of our debates, there are still a lot of other small mechanics running around the game too. At the beginning of a round the Leader will roll a weather die and this will determine how much fuel the base consumes that round. This is a small amount of randomness to how often players have to spend their actions refueling the power systems in the base. There are dogs(?) that move around the base and if you are caught alone with one you may change to the alien team. While they can be caught to remove their risk, this requires some teamwork and trust between players. Based on the iconic 1980s horror movie by John Carpenter, The Thing: The Boardgame is a semi co-operative hidden role game for up to 8 players.

If the vote is unsuccessful (majority thumbs down or a tie), the Flamethrower card has been ‘used’ and is discarded. No-one is eliminated early. Room Effects 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. 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! The dozen playable characters include familiar faces from the film - notably Kurt Russell’s MacReady and Keith David’s Childs - with the map providing a top-down view of the entire outpost. True to the paranoia of the movie, players can equip themselves with weapons such as a flamethrower and dynamite, and even tie up suspected imitations and test their blood as they try to weed out the alien horrors among them - if even a single imitation makes it onto the helicopter, the players (and humanity) lose. The movie board game retells the events of the 1982 film, as four to eight players take on the roles of researchers stranded in the Antarctic with a deadly shape-shifting alien. The group of players must sweep the station, complete missions and ultimately escape in a helicopter. Making things harder are hidden traitors, who can sabotage the humans’ efforts to make it out alive by destroying rooms and impeding other actions if they remain undetected.

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. John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing was a milestone of the Horror genre. Both were immensely successful and influential, pushing the boundaries of practical effects at the time, and raising the bar for cinematic horror going forward. A group of people trapped together not knowing who is friend or foe? Sounds like a pretty engrossing social deduction board game concept, don’t you think?

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. When completing missions in rooms, you might get items (or ‘gear’) to use throughout the game. These can be used at specific times by the person who holds the item. The Thing is a semi co-operative game and this means that despite working together, some of you may have alternate agendas. You must cooperate to survive but who is really on your side? And if you reveal The Thing are you ready to fight it? The road to victory is truly hard, but not impossible. BeI found the game had a few issues regarding the alien player. While its great to become the alien and surprise everyone, players who join forces with them at a later time don’t really have much to do other than help decide where the aliens strength tokens will be placed. The moments when one player is convinced that another person is playing as a human, and they defend them to the hilt, only to then realise they were wrong, can be hilarious, tense and highly rewarding. Power Out - Place a ‘power out’ card on the room in question. Counter it by discarding a Flashlight supply card. Although the crew in the film consisted of 12, we only have 8 in the core game. The majority of the iconic ones are here but I can’t figure out why they left out Childs, one of the only survivors at the movies’ climax. The idea of drawing tokens from a bag to see if a dog infected you is scary but exciting as your role can suddenly switch. Downplaying the result and keeping your head down while you secretly changes roles feels like your acting out a role in front of your friends.

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