Emergency meeting!
John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing ends with its few remaining characters in a desperate spot. Faced with an alien creature that can infect, assimilate, and emulate human bodies, the survivors don’t know who among them might secretly be an alien, or whether their pyrrhic efforts have eliminated the infection. They’re stranded in the Antarctic with their research base destroyed. Their resources are gone, there’s no meaningful shelter left, they’re freezing to death, and they can’t even trust each other enough to work together.
Sounds like fun, right? Like something you can’t wait to experience for yourself?
Much like 2022’s board game version of the classic gang-war movie The Warriors, Pendragon Game Studio’s board game The Thing aims to recreate a movie’s plot and vibe for a set of players who enjoy a punishing challenge and an oppressive situation. Kickstarted in 2022 and now available for retail purchase for the first time, the game blends elements from a variety of familiar board games, but the pileup 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 pulling off a victory feels particularly fantastic — but in game after game, our playtesters failed early, died messily, and wound up deeply frustrated with The Thing.
Image: Pendragon Game Studio
There are two major modes for the base game. In the version for four to eight players, one player starts as the single secret alien running around the Antarctic research base, using cards to covertly 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 move forward quickly, but this version of the game can be even harder to win.
First-time players should expect a steep learning curve. There are eight phases to each round of the game, and unlike most similarly complicated games, The Thing doesn’t supply players with a card or guide to help them track of what happens when: The designated leader each round gets a phase guide, but that’s it. All the action options — like preparing food in the kitchen, going to the med lab for DNA testing kits, fueling up the boiler room and the electrical room, and so forth — take a while to understand because there are so many choices and different rules for each room. And as many previous players noted after the Kickstarter-funded version landed, the rulebook is ambiguous and sometimes hard to follow.
Once players know the game and have decided how to handle their rules questions, though, The Thing can be a brisk, tense, make-or-break experience. The most ingenious part of the game is built around all those tasks: There’s a clever tension between the risks and incentives as you choose whether to do them together or go it alone.
Several players fixing the sabotaged radio room together, for instance, significantly speeds up the process, making it more likely that you’ll be able to call for rescue. But every encounter with another player in the same room makes it possible that you’ll get infected and assimilated by the alien. Even if you survive a seemingly innocuous group project, every encounter with another person moves you up the “suspicion track,” which makes your life more complicated.
And it’s already plenty complicated enough. 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. Any tasks you skip will hit you with penalties and setbacks, as the base breaks down and the alien infection spreads unseen. The game’s biggest flaw, though, is the randomly determined and punishingly high failure rate for those tasks. The game hardly needs an infiltrating alien to raise the threat level, since trying to keep the heat and light on and find an escape route is a herculean task all on its own.
That’s the really baffling thing about The Thing’s play design. The many survival-crucial tasks that need to be done suggest a longer, more in-depth game in which players fight a retreating battle against the elements while gearing up to fight the alien and piecing together information about who they can and can’t trust. It feels like it’s meant in the spirit of other long-play traitor-mechanic resource-management games, like 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 get meaningful information about each other’s secret identities. A few bad card draws or dice rolls can make the base fall apart before the alien contagion has even meaningfully spread. The humans’ one advantage is that if they expose an alien, it’s rarely a significant threat, compared to the entropy taking over the base. Exposed aliens are weak and have limited options, apart from hastening the game’s progression. Occasionally, though, with a lucky guess, an alien can boot another player from the game entirely, in a mechanic guaranteed to anger some participants.
The problem here is that in secret-role games, the tension usually comes from watching other people’s behavior and trying to suss out the traitor’s identity. In The Thing, identifying the infected is an absolute must for the endgame, where the escaping humans will instantly lose if they rescue a secret alien or accidentally abandon a fellow human. And yet the human players have a ridiculously small chance of actually detecting aliens because there are so many restrictions on their testing abilities, from the high failure rate of tests to limits on who they can check and how many checks they’re allowed per round.
The punishment for getting it wrong is draconian: You can effectively manage your resources for the whole game and still lose with a single wrong guess about information the game never allowed you to gather. An expansion, The Thing: Norwegian Outpost, which requires the base game to play, lets players similarly approximate the action of the 2011 prequel film, unhelpfully also titled The Thing, and its ruleset is kinder in this one regard, at least — in Norwegian Outpost, humans can escape alone, without having to save everyone else to win.
The all-or-nothing stakes feel appropriate to the 1982 movie, where the human characters are up against an unknown and constantly expanding threat in a lethal environment. Living out a viciously unbalanced horror movie isn’t necessarily enjoyable, though. The Thing feels like it’s designed only for people who want that exact experience — the opportunity to test their wits against an egregiously unbalanced scenario where they have surprisingly little chance of winning, and an intimidating number of ways to die.