After the failed attempt to play The Thing the boardgame with Nathan during my recent visit. I was wondering when or even if I’d get it to the table.

But after creating an event on the Fenland Gamers discord server, and limiting the player count (because it would be a learning game) I had a date and time set to get it to the table.

Last night saw that plan to get The Thing the boardgame to the table come to fruition.

Luckily our player count for the game (four) was enough to learn the main game rules. For player counts less than four The Thing becomes a co-op boardgame.

Like Scythe and any other game I’ve organised a session for I’m there early to get things set up. We were using the neoprene playmat for the game, plus the plastic character and alien minis. No cardboard standees in this game.

Setup seems fiddly. But it’s not really. It’s just parts of it are dependent on knowing the player count. I initially setup for a four player count. Although it was potentially possible that we’d have six! It stayed at four.

Once everyone had arrived and selected the character they wanted we started playing.

I was the starting leader.

After drawing an infection token to see what our secret role was. We got down to the task of surviving long enough to escape the alien. Or in my case remain undetected long enough to infect the others. Oh yes I was the alien.

There was a definite Battlestar Galactica/Dead of Winter vibe to The Thing! Which isn’t a surprise considering they are all hidden traitor games. The Thing is closer to BSG than DoW. DoW has a story element that the other two don’t.

Once you have had a couple of rounds the turn sequence becomes familiar. They aren’t actually overly complicated turns. We actually skipped the third turn the whole game because no alien was revealed until the very end.

Although we did have fun. I think the game like the other two needs the higher player counts.

In our game no testing of players took place because we didn’t get to the laboratory more than once, nor did we have both parts required to perform a flame test.

We spent our time trying to keep the boiler and generator repaired, finding keys and getting the odd weapon. Initially I did try repairing the radio, and take food from the pantry. But between the four of us we really didn’t have enough actions to do everything except try and keep on top of things and maybe escape via one of the bases broken vehicles.

With the higher player count more actions could be done around the base.

In the end it turned out everyone had been infected as an alien. Which under the rules meant the last human infected lost the game, and the aliens win! Although the aliens won twice as they were on the escape vehicle too! Which is when we discovered everyone was infected. Then it became a question of who was the last person to be infected.

We did enjoy The Thing enough that we want to play it again. Especially with a higher player count. A Saturday session for sure.