AUSTIN, Texas—"Look, I think that guy's pretty inhuman," I found myself pleading to a Mondo rep. "But I picked you as captain, which is totally a human move."
I wasn't begging for early access to some figurine or poster sale from the impeccably designed film collectibles company. I wasn't engaged in some intense round of promotional dodgeball. Instead, as I sat with seven other interested board gamers for a special preview of Mondo's first boardgame release, The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, I got swept up. I wanted only humans to make it onto the escape helicopter, dammit.
And judging by the 45-minutes-or-so I spent navigating possibly Thing-infested rooms and begging for Petri dishes, I'm pretty confident others will feel the same once they can play this game in late October.
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Hello Mr. MacReady.Nathan Mattise
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The Thing is just as grotesque in mini-form.Nathan Mattise
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This is Mondo, no generalized minis here. (That's me, I played as Fuchs.)Nathan Mattise
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Each player receives a blood type card to start and then a new one after clear each section. You're either human or, well....Nathan Mattise
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Each player holds 5 supply cards at any given time. These cards sometimes serve practical functions (i.e., the team needs someone with a flashlight or fire extinguisher to deal with a room situation), other times the amount of leniency they provide for dice rolls is what you really need.Nathan Mattise
A familiar, bleak premise
The basic gist of Outpost 31 will be familiar to anyone that admires John Carpenter's horror classic. "It is the start of the bleak, desolate Antarctic winter when a group of NSF researchers manning the claustrophobic, isolated US Outpost 31 comes into contact with a hostile extraterrestrial lifeform," Mondo begins its story. "Bent on assimilating Earth’s native species, this being infiltrates the facility—creating a perfect imitation of one of the Outpost 31 crew. The staff frantically begin a sweep of the base, desperate to purge this alien infection before escaping to warn McMurdo Station that somewhere, out there in the frigid darkness, something horrible is waiting."
As you might expect from Mondo (working here with the folks at Project Raygun), no detail in the game is too small to pay homage to the original film. The minis are all customized, from the beloved MacReady to Clark and his dog, and special editions of the game will include optional players like The Norwegian (a dead guy in the snow). The rooms in the map correspond to what's seen in the film, and each mission card includes small quotes of Thing dialogue.
As for gameplay, Outpost 31 borrows mechanics from other paranoia-fueled co-op social deduction games like Battlestar Galactica, Dead of Winter, and Dark Moon. Anywhere from four to eight players must navigate three separate sections of the outpost, completing various missions every turn in order to find a special tool (a rope, a flamethrower, dynamite) and beat back The Thing to officially clear a section. Clear all three sections, and you reach the equally tricky endgame. Here, the group votes on someone to act as captain, and this person must round up the remaining humans on an escape helicopter. Do it successfully and you've survived this time, humanity.
This is much easier said than done, of course. At the start of the game, all participants may appear human, but one is in fact infected (selected randomly as blood type cards are doled out). The infected's goal is to derail the human escape either by destroying everything, infecting everything, or stowing away on that escape helicopter in the end. And as humans successfully pass from section to section, the number of infected players gradually increases.
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Here's my player profile. Fuchs is a scientist, so I had special powers when acting as captain that other player types don't.Nathan Mattise
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Hellloooooo Clark (he's a maintenance-type, one of three character types in the game).Nathan Mattise
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Oh, and you may draw Sabotage cards instead of true supplies. These are important for the infected, as they add another layer of difficulty for humans to successfully navigate any mission. (Fail enough missions, humans lose.)Nathan Mattise
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Each "round" involves one player serving as captain and selecting a mission card. The card outlines how many and what type of fellow players you need to involve in the objective (each involved player will hand you 1x supply) and what you need to succeed.Nathan Mattise
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This is essentially the infected's success tracker, detailing how many rooms have been destroyed (via fire, infection takeover, etc.) and how many missions have been failed. Either can act as a route to failure for the humans.Nathan Mattise
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A look at the human's game tracker—this faction must successfully pass through three sections while defeating The Thing and using a centerpiece escape tool like rope or a flamethrower.Nathan Mattise
Mission mayhem
If the broad overview of the game sounds challenging, wait until you see the twists in individual rounds.
To start, each player is assigned a character type (maintenance, opps, scientists), each with special abilities that you can use while serving as captain. Every round involves one player as captain (indicated by a gun cutout that rotates to the left) who selects a mission card, detailing the investigation/challenge ahead. The mission cards dictate how many and what kind of fellow players the captain must enlist for that round's mission; the cards also outline what must happen to successfully complete a mission. (See an example mission card in the gallery above.)
Missions can be further complicated in a myriad of ways. If you unknowingly have an infected person as part of the mission team, they could slyly subvert things by offering useless supply cards. They could also explicitly ruin the day by offering sabotage cards, essentially extra requirements for success on top of whatever the mission card demands. And if you succeed in a mission (thus earning the right to flip over a room chip), you may uncover a battle with The Thing. This requires the same team to use further supply card resources, this time with the aim of creating enough dice rolls (up to six) for the captain to achieve three or four of a kind in order to beat back The Thing. This is yet another chance for an infected player to muck things up for humanity.
There are further special circumstances (failing missions can result in electrical failures or smoke build-up that requires certain supply cards; section-clearing tools give abilities, such as testing blood types or possibly incinerating a fellow player, to the current captain), but what really complicates Outpost 31 is the bluffing. Players can publicly say whatever they want, but every time supply cards are handed to a captain they are done so blindly, after which the captain shuffles the pile. So some chummy co-player may seem lively and friendly when claiming they have an axe to give you, but they might really be hacking you in the back with sabotage cards.
The game centers on trying to suss out who among you hasn't yet been infected based on the many small actions a player can take throughout. Or, if you're a lying sack of alien ooze, the game comes down to participating just enough to seem innocuous as you're slowly steering humanity towards certain doom.
Infectious
The group I played with included folks with various levels of Thing familiarity (including me, the idiot who never watched Carpenter's edition), yet we all found ourselves wrapped up in the unfolding plot. As someone whose board gaming typically centers on one night a month of Target-available classics like Taboo, Trivial Pursuit, or Scrabble, the gameplay here was both engaging and easy to pick up. (Mondo reps said to plan on at least an hour and a half for the average game, though player count and rules explanation will change that.)
As for my character's fate, I was selected to board the 'copter—phew, because I hadn't been infected. Sadly, having a group of eight players meant we needed to pick the right five, and our captain tragically made only four correct choices. Naturally, the guy I called inhuman was left behind (he was human). Our helicopter lifted off, taking the infection worldwide.
The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 will be available online and in stores this October, but you can check out the official rules in the meantime. We previewed a final version of the game, so expect something similar despite a myriad of special editions to come.
Listing image by Nathan Mattise
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