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

Product Information

The flamethrower is very powerful, though this likely doesn’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with the movie. There is even a full suspicion track to help players remember which player(s) has been taking risks or interacting with others more often than others. You can choose your preference based on the number of players, and their relative experience with the game. These miniatures represent the 8 main characters seen in the movie, such as MacReady or Doctor Blair.

Copyright © 2023 Ares Games Srl, Sede Legale: Piazza Petrucci 8, 55041 Camaiore (LU), Capitale Sociale € 50000 i. This a wonderful system and such a simple way to allow non human players to wreak havoc across the base without anyone ever knowing what role card they have.

The Thing is a semi co-operative game and this means that despite working together, some of you may have alternate agendas. BSG places the admiral and president in charge of an aspect of the game or those players will make key decisions when they come up. With base maintenance being easy to keep track of and escape being a simple concept to grasp, everyone can easily get involved and contribute their ideas and strategies. An issue I found is that if by a small chance the alien player was discovered in the first few rounds, they could struggle to get their strength up to really effect the human players.

When I say kill you, I don’t mean changing teams like in a lot of these games: here, your character would die and you would be removed from the game. When it comes to the final decision as to who you want to pick to join you on the helicopter, you can reveal three, one, or zero blood tests to check other player’s roles based on your position on the contagion tracker. It’s up to all the other players to root out which of them is acting falsely and destroy the alien player. Co-designing the game are Giuseppe Cicero and Andrea Crespi, co-creator of Potion Explosion and survival horror game Alone.Most of the phases of The Thing are quick and easy to understand, the rulebook is well written, with plenty of diagrams and examples to help you. While I have played with the upgraded Kickstarter edition, I don’t think any of the upgraded components are necessary.