The Thing Board Game Review
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"The Thing" is an excellent game: exciting, with tension that builds as the game progresses, just like in the movie. The weight category is medium. The replayability is very decent.
COMPONENTS
I bought the kickstarter Super Deluxe. The components in it are gorgeous. Excellent miniatures, and the characters are recognizable (which cannot be said about Western Legends, for example). Thick, pleasant to the touch plastic tokens. The cards are also thick. My only gripe is that the text on the tokens used in the contact phase is white on white. It's a little hard to read. Also, when playing alien-human interactions, dog tokens are used, which was a little confusing to us until we realized that this was for economy: to not produce an extra set of tokens for humans. In general, this is a trifle.
BOOK OF RULES
The rulebook doesn't miss a beat, but it does feel confusing in places, especially when it comes to the layout process. Technically everything is correct, but to understand, you have to read the whole section carefully. There is a lot of commotion with decks, bags, etc. depending on the number of players. An example of a confused description is the instructions for mixing location maps in the dogs section. In general, it's a good idea to read the rules sections carefully before doing anything.
GAME PROCESS
The game is good in many ways because it borrows a lot of mechanics from other games: we found references to Avalon, "Dead of Winter", Ultimate Werewolf Extreme and even "Secret Hitler". However, the mechanics did not stupidly copy, but modified. Almost all changes benefited the game.
In essence, this is a game about the secret placement of workers (each character can go to one location per turn), in which there are interesting, difficult solutions. Here is one of our "favorite" points: when repairing the base (which is a critical part of the game), if 2 characters are in the same location, then you get great bonuses. For example, if 1 character repairs a radio station, you will repair one token, if 2, you will repair three tokens, and if 3, then as many as six. So there is a good reason to go around the locations not alone.
However, when two or more characters appear in the same location, contact occurs. If one of the participants participating in the contact is an alien (at the start, one of the players becomes an alien, that is, a bad guy), then with a 50% chance he will infect others, and they will also become aliens. Thus, for the sake of bonuses, you have to take risks every time. And this is just one of many situations where a difficult decision must be made.
Another interesting aspect of the worker placement mechanic is that on your turn you place your character in the chosen location and place the action card face down. Available actions are activation, repair and sabotage; the effect of each differs depending on the selected location. When everyone goes, the leader shuffles the deck, turns the card over and chooses which character to assign it to. Then, if desired, he can reveal the next card from the stack, and so on, until each character gets one. It reminds me a lot of the mechanics of Avalon, only with new interesting nuances.
There are many different victory conditions for both humans and aliens, and with the addition of Norwegian Station (based on the 2011 film), there are even more.
I will not go into further details of the rules. I will only say that all the mechanics of the game are designed to generate tension, annoyance and force you to make difficult decisions.
CONS OF THE GAME
Personally, there are almost no flaws in "The Thing". The only complaint is that the characters have asymmetric abilities, most of which boil down to "Your character gets a bonus at location X." The problem is that because of this, players often go to the same location every turn to get a bonus. Maybe it's not that bad, since the leader shuffles the deck anyway, and deciding which card to put in the stack is just as important as deciding where to go.
Another drawback is the rules. If you read the rules cover to cover before the start, it will be difficult to digest them. Before the first game, it is better to familiarize yourself with how the phases of the game are arranged, and then make the first move, explaining the rules of the current phase as you go. Rarely applicable rules (such as dissecting an alien) can be explained as follows: “If an alien is revealed, it receives powerful buns. On your turn, you can open into Phase X if you're an alien, and then we'll run through the rules." True, hardcore fans who prefer to know all the rules in advance will have a hard time.
I also want to emphasize an interesting point: when people are infected, only the infected player will know about it; even the alien who infected has no idea if he succeeded. In our party, when about half way through the party, EVERYONE became aliens, but we didn't know it. When the game ended (with the aliens winning, unsurprisingly) and we revealed the cards, we spent 20 minutes trying to trace who infected whom.
The Thing will definitely remain in my collection and I'll be putting the game down regularly. Especially in winter.
