That Thing You Be

I saw John Carpenter's The Thing when I was 14 years old. It was the first scary movie I watched in a theatre with my friends, and for 100+ minutes of its 109 minutes runtime, I was wound up tighter that an alarm clock spring. The staff at an Antarctic research station find themselves pitted against an alien that can perfectly mimic any of them, leaving them incapable of trusting one another. It is a brilliant thriller with some absolutely groundbreaking practical creature effects work, including the messiest shapeshifting and assimilation ever captured on film, but the movie underperformed tragically at the box office.

Looking at the other genre films that came up in 1982, it's perhaps not completely surprising that The Thing's dark and insidious vision had difficulty 'finding its audience' as Carpenter says in the commentary: Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, Wrath of Khan, The Dark Crystal, Tron -oh, and that other little show about an alien - E.T.

Saturday night saw a half-dozen of us gathered in the Batcave for some Korean Fried Chicken and long-overdue boardgaming, but Star Trek Risk caps out at 5 players. I had picked up Mondo Games' The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 while in Texas, which supports up to 8. That number makes it a likely play at G&G XIII in a couple months, so getting familiar with the rules seemed like a good idea, and we busted it out.

I found a version of Ennio Morricone's haunting film score on Google Play and put it on for additional atmosphere. Rather than leave the tv screen on the album cover, I found a collage-style poster with an unsettling tagline and threw it on as my wallpaper:

The thing is a slightly collaborative boardgame, insofar as most of the players are working together to get the equipment they need in order to board a helicopter and escape the station.  The problematic element, of course, is that one of them is the titular Thing.

This rogue player is chosen at random by a set of blood test cards, and will work to sabotage the missions without giving themselves away to the other player. I was relieved to see my blood test reveal I was a genuine human, especially as I had gotten first pick and taken Kurt Russell's character, MacReady, as my avatar. You see, I am full on terrible at deduction-type games, from Clue on up. Maybe it's the downside of a fertile imagination, but I can see so many permutations and possibilities from the data provided that I am simply incapable of rendering them down to something manageable and data driven.

As the game's first captain, I drew the mission card which directed me to take 5 other players to the room of my choosing to look for the rope we needed. When that mission was anonymously sabotaged by one of the participants, we all knew that meant Garry (Pete) was clear of suspicion, but that any of the rest of us could be.

Whether it was my failure as first captain (the role proceeds clockwise around the table) or something else, Childs (Earl) suspected me right out of the gate, which in turn made me observe loudly that he perhaps protesteth overmuch. After all, I couldn't prove it, but I was a human!

Until, you know, we completed the first of three phases, triggering another blood test and suddenly I found myself on the other side...with absolutely no idea who my teammate was.

Now, however, my protestations were laden with falsehood, and despite my usually canny ability to misdirect and mislead others, it turns out I have zero poker face when it comes to my false innocence. Before too long, Earl had convinced others at the table that I was probably not to be trusted (which was true now, but hadn't been when he started!), including Garry, who now had the party's flamethrower.

The flamethrower can be used twice, ostensibly in combat with the Thing when it shows up, becoming progressively larger and stronger. It can also be sued to incinerate another player, if the rest of the table agrees to it! This exhausts the asset though, so Garry/Pete instead chose to use one of its charges to prompt a test, which compelled me to show him my blood test card.

When he told the other players that yes, in fact, I could not be trusted, I tried to spin it as Pete lying about my provenance, but that dog, as anticipated, just did not hunt. I spent the remaining turns pretty much as a bystander, still unwilling to admit my inhumanity, and silently cheering on my unknown teammate.

This turned out to be Fuchs (Scott), and since the base ended up destroyed before the humans could escape, that meant my side had won. Hurray, I guess? I'm, still unsure how to feel about the outcome, since the character I'd chosen at the outset had effectively died offscreen and been replaced in between turns. I can't help feel that a bit of my agency has been co-opted.

Had the base survived, the game's Final Captain would need to choose precisely who to allow onto the helicopter, and only then would everyone's blood samples be revealed. Leave a human behind or permit a Thing to board the chopper, and humanity has lost; only by getting all the surviving humans off the base and leaving the Thing to freeze can the human side prevail. No easy skate, if you ask me!

Even under these bizarre circumstances, I am still appreciating the win, though. And I learned that my forthrightness, my strong suit in many a game (and much of life), is perhaps my greatest liability in games like Infection at Outpost 31. I think next time I will make it my goal to bamboozle both sides, and see if that gets me a little further along.

Meeting John Carpenter at Calgary Comic Expo in 2013