Ain't No Thing

There are plenty of "hidden role" games out there, and my group of friends has played more than a few. We've hunted werewolves, outwitted Cthulhu cultists, fought in an underground resistance, and more. But we've never encountered a theme so perfectly suited to the "deceiving your friends" genre as The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31.

Inspired by John Carpenter's outstanding 1982 movie The Thing, this game casts each player as one of the researchers at an isolated Antarctic outpost. Someone in the group is secretly an alien "imitation" of a human, and will infect and replace more humans as the game continues. The humans are trying to gather the tools they need to get to the helicopter and escape (without any tag-along aliens), while the "imitations" try to destroy the station or slip out in the escape.

Of course there should be a hidden role game in this setting! And at first glance, this game does a lot to capture what you'd expect to see in such a game. There's tons of flavor from the movie, including characters with evocative abilities, memorable items and "plot points," and detailed plastic figures (that are sadly a bit difficult to distinguish due to lack of colors).

The rules set manages to weave in these elements without getting overly complicated. You proceed through a series of randomly drawn missions. Each one requires certain types of characters, and certain types of items (which players pledge -- truthfully or not -- to have in their hands of cards). It's quite easy to explain to a group of players what is going on at any given moment, and what needs to be done for each side in the game to succeed.

The problem is, the game isn't remotely balanced. There might be a narrow band through the middle of what is possible, in which the game actually functions well. But the "margins" are way too wide for you to ever stay in that zone. On the one side, it feels trivially easy for the imitation players to sabotage efforts and destroy the station. It is likely that they'll be "found out" in due course, but the alien ability to wreak havoc and destruction is great enough that it feels the station will almost always burn to the ground and cause a loss for the humans before that happens.

On the other side, imitation players could just opt to "do nothing." They could be completely helpful and honest for the entire game, and then get to the endgame moment when players must decide who is allowed on the helicopter. Only one imitation needs to get in the mix for that side to win the game, and if no one has done anything wrong, it will be impossible to know who is who. The odds are against randomly picking the humans and only the humans, so again the game is stacked against them.

There is so much potential to this game. I want to love it, and it would be great in theory if this became the go-to "hidden role" game in my group (for a while, anyway). But it simply isn't going to. It's fundamentally broken at the core, and it's hard to imagine any easy tweaks or house rules that would shore up the problems. I don't anticipate ever playing it again. I don't know if I can grade a "does not work" game anything other than an F -- though this feels like it comes so close to tapping into something cool that I feel like taking pity on it. Call it a D+, maybe? Perhaps there's really no difference; either way, I wouldn't recommend it.