You have seen The thing, Law? Well, that’s the customization of the board game.
Very serious fans of the film will of course already know that there Who is going there is the name of John W. Campbell Jr.’s original 1938 novel on which the film is based, but just wanted to be clear as a working knowledge of both will help here.
Who is going there (the game), which bears the book’s name but has a lot of visual cues taken straight from John Carpenter’s 1982 film, was originally released in 2018 and was received fairly well, albeit with some fairly common complaints. It returned a few years later in 2020 with a second edition that, like a video game in need of some maintenance after launch, attempted to solve some of the problems of the original version.
I never played this first edition so I won’t be able to compare it to it. I am not sure if I will ever do it want to play it, as even this newer, reworked version has some glaring issues that I would have thought would be caught and ironed out in a re-release (and I’ll come back to that later).
How is the game actually? The official round-up does an excellent job of getting the point across:
Who is going there is a cooperative game of growing paranoia. At the beginning of the game, all players are human and there is no reason not to trust each other completely, but when the temperature drops and mistakes are made, players start to doubt everything and everyone around them.
You have to build, trade, and upgrade to prepare for the Antarctic terrain, rabid dog attacks, insane lunatics … and most importantly, the alien that is now free in camp. Everything you build and upgrade has a purpose … to keep you alive and human! Throughout the game, you’ll want to trade with other players and help each other build stronger weapons and better equipment, while also handing out food and medicine kits. However, make sure to trust them as trading is a great opportunity for The Thing.
If you stay inside, you may not freeze to death, but it won’t help you or those around you win. The only way to ensure victory is to leave camp! The problem with this is that it is the first chance you come across The Thing when you are out of camp. Whether you’re fixing the boiler, fixing the door, or battling the freezing outside temperatures, you all need each other to survive. But trust is hard to come by when you have to be careful … who goes there?
Basically, it is then a game in which everyone works together and trust each other to try to overcome a dangerous situation until it is no longer the case. Instead, it becomes a game where everyone suspects that everyone else is secretly a murderous alien life form camouflaged by the freezing of human flesh.
The goal is for each player to try to survive a set number of laps (usually 15) and at the end get on board a helicopter and get rid of hell. Who wins, however, depends on who exactly gets on board this helicopter. Human players try to keep infected alien monsters out while everyone infected pretends not to be infected, smiles and like everything else besides humans gets into the helicopter absolutely fine. There is then a lot of depressing math and luck to find the winner and I am not going to talk about it yet because it brings me down and I want to talk about all the good things first.
Everything up to Who is going there The endgame that really spends 98% of your time on it is awesome. It’s a wonderful adaptation of The thingThe source’s desperation as survival becomes increasingly desperate, and the growing suspicion everyone feels as it becomes clear that an alien may be hiding under someone’s skin.
Conditions are so brutal that it is often difficult just to survive. Dog attacks, terrible weather and exploding cauldrons make each lap more dangerous than the last. Throw in the fact that you have to go outside all the time to get things you need for the helicopter escape and then secretly monitor and worry everyone else at the table at all times, and things get pretty stressful the closer you get to the end!
The whole thing is very tense and the fact that you all have to work together while trying to do it at the same time Not Collaboration – Cooperation is vital, but cooperation is also the easiest way for alien gamers to infect humans – makes you feel like you’re playing through the second half of the movie, balancing survival with a descent into insanity.
So it’s a tremendous shame that it sucks when the end finally comes. If the players can survive until all the rounds are over, a helicopter will come to rescue you and it’s time for the table – you can play with 3-6 players but you really want that to be 4-6 – to make decisions somewhat more difficult. The squad leader, who set the turn order during the game, can be voted out of his position if other players suspect they are the thing, and whoever ends up on the job is responsible for deciding who ends up on the Helicopter goes and who is left to die.
Anyone who makes it into the helicopter then adds up the number of helicopter points they earned during the game by defying the weather and going outside, and finally rolls a special dice to generate it More
To win, people have to meet this score, even if they … The Thing (or more things!) Get on the helicopter with them? And in order for the infected to win, they must have at least one alien in the helicopter and see that the humans are not getting the required score.
It’s an incredibly draining way of ending an otherwise great game for two reasons. First, it’s difficult to get an idea of who is simply infected through the gameplay (unlike other similar games like Battlestar Galactica), so that in the end the vote often felt like a guess rather than the result of long-term detective work.
Second, a big part of getting your required score comes from a roll of the dice! I’ve played this game twice and the first time when people lost because an infected man made it onto the helicopter to roll a 6 and I, the human, rolled a 1. It didn’t matter that I’d frozen my ass off in the past two hours, getting three bonus points for helicopters, fending off aliens, and getting frostbite because a single roll of the dice negated it.
That’s nonsense! Taking such a significant part of the gamer’s agency out of your own hands at the end of hours sucks. Throw in the craziness of being able to win even though you let aliens on the helicopter with you and the arbitrary nature of consulting a flowchart to see if you won or not and Who is going there really does overtime to cut fun or contentment out of his end.
I still think it’s a very cool co-op survival game and the parts where everyone works together – that’s that huge Most of your time is spent at the table with Who is going there– are really unique and enjoyable. Just know This is a game for people who are traveling much more than the destination.
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