I am going to start off this review by stating that I have never seen The Thing. I do not know anything about it, however, Dann really loves the movie and was super excited to play it. The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 is a strategy based, co-op game where you play as a member of a team, looking to find a way out of the antarctic research base through unlocking new levels of the building and defeating enemies.
Each player starts off by picking a character. These people are from the John Carpenter movie, and have different types, which are represented by colors. Some are scientists, some work in engineering, etc. Each character will also get five random supply cards. Most of these cards are helpful items, with dice numbers attached to them, however some are sabotage cards. To decide if you are infected in this game, there will be a round of blood samples at the start, which will result in someone being contaminated, and thus there definitely being a bad guy among us.
This bad guy will be able to use sabotages or strategicly hand in weak supplies, to ensure that the rest of the team cannot complete missions. Other members of the team cannot use sabotages unless that’s the only item they have in their hand, which rarely happens as there are plenty of opportunities to discard cards you don’t want.
To start off the round, one player is given the leader token, which is a gun. That player will then flip over a mission card and start making decisions. Mission cards tell you what you are going to be doing. They outline a set number of players that need to be taken on this mission as well as a guideline to how many characters of what type should be taken. If you do not follow the types of the mission, either through not having them or not wanting too, it will restrict you when it comes to completing the mission because it blocks out an important shuffle phase.
You then get to decide who goes on the mission, and what room you want to enter. The rooms are divided into sections, based on number tiles that you place on them during set up. These tiles have random items or monsters underneath, and you will need to complete them to open up the next zone of the game. Once you have picked out the room and moved the players currently on the mission towards it, you can then move any remaining players to rooms that may need help. If you’ve previously failed a room or if someone has sabotaged some, it might have a power outage or a fire. You can send rogue members of the team to these rooms, and they can spend a card making them useable again.
Inside the main mission, you then need to complete the card. Often, these missions involve flipping over a set number of cards and having a specific item or stat, or rolling dice. Everyone on the team can talk together about what they can put in, but it is always a mystery if they actually did what they claimed they can. The team leader, once everyone’s supply cards for the mission are put in, then shuffle them, reveal them to deal with any sabotages, and if there are none, shuffle them again and proceed with the mission requirements. There is a good variety in these missions, which is great to see. The captain can also discard a card from their hand to replace it with a random one from the supply, which is a clever way to increase the odds to win (or in the case of the imposter, fail) a mission.
In The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, the player who is the leader can also use one of two abilities, listed on their cards, to help them achieve their goals. There are also cards in the supply deck that can be used at any time, to allow everyone to discard a card and claim a new one back. Between turns, you can also draw back up to five, which is really helpful. When it comes to defeating monsters, there is a lot of dice rolling and matching up that needs to be done to ensure the monster is killed.
When you and your team unlock a new section in The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, there is a new blood test that happens, which can turn humans into monsters, but again is kept a secret. This keeps everyone guessing, as there is a possibility that more and more monsters can be joining your friends, trying to ensure you fail. This is an interesting mechanic, and the mixing of cards to share infections is something we saw recently in Bristol 1350.
As some of the team is working against you, it’s really an interesting dynamic. Trying to work together, but knowing at least one person is lying to you, results in some very interesting conversations and revealing shuffled cards ensures that people can’t pick out a saboteur from the order people submitted cards. We did really enjoy The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, and Dann felt that it was a great interpretation of the film itself; He said that he was really impressed with all the quotes on the cards, the attention to detail on the cards and models, and liked that the theming ran through even down to the chess-computer from the film being used as a token to represent the destruction of the base.
You can find The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 on Amazon.
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