Episode 207: John Carpenter's The Thing

 Another episode of Perilous Tales using the figures described in my last blog.

To game John Carpenter's The Thing, I used the special rules for "The Thing In The Ice" and the location perils from "Arctic Camp" from the Perilous Tales rules.  In the ruleset, the four minions are all "things that were sled dogs", so I created the following villains for the figures I'd put together.

Lars the Norwegian MINION, AGGRESSIVE, 4 WOUNDS, SKILL 3

Kennel-Thing MINION, AGGRESSIVE, 4 WOUNDS, SKILL 4

Bennings-Thing MINION, AGGRESSIVE, 6 WOUNDS, SKILL 4

Spider-Head Thing MINION, LURKER, 6 WOUNDS, SKILL 3

The Thing MASTER, AGGRESSIVE, 12 WOUNDS, SKILL 6

I also created two extra special rules:

Villain order: When Threat Markers 1 to 5 are revealed, the Villains appear in the following order, regardless of the number on the Threat Marker: a friendly dog chased by an armed Norwegian, Kennel-Thing (remove the friendly dog when revealed), Bennings-Thing, Spider-Head Thing and The Thing.

Det er ikke en bikkje!: the friendly dog moves 4” in a random direction each turn and will not attack the heroes.  However, Lars the Norwegian wants to kill the dog.  Unfortunately, he is a very poor shot and each time will instead attack the hero nearest the dog.  Due to Perilous Production budget cuts, Lars arrives by dog sled rather than helicopter.  If Lars dies, the dog sled will move 6” towards the nearest table edge and exit when it reaches it.

My ice mat was laid out with snowdrifts and some cargo containers to represent Outpost 31 and the threat markers deployed in the Standard pattern.

Blair spotted the Ice Cave in the centre of the map so the team split up towards the upper and lower edges of the playing area.  Lars the Norwegian arrived first.

Due to budget constraints at Perilous Productions, Lars was pursuing a dog by sled rather than the helicopter used in the movie.

Lars' poor aiming saw him inflict 4 wounds on Dr Copper before MacReady shot him dead.  Copper healed himself and Windows walked into a snow drift on the other side of the table.  With no other threats around in the following turn, Blair wandered into the Ice Cave and Copper healed the wounds that were picked up.  Avoiding the snow drift, Palmer revealed the Kennel-Thing.

They wounded each other whilst MacReady discovered Bennings-Thing.

Bennings-Thing caused 4 wounds on MacReady whilst the Kennel-Dog managed to kill Palmer.  MacReady and Blair managed to kill Bennings-Thing but it reappeared following the next threat check and killed Windows.

Bennings-Thing and Kennel-Thing were then picked off by some sharp shooting by the remaining members of the party.  But the Kennel-Thing was back after the next threat check and seriously wounded Blair.

MacReady pressed on and found the Spider-Thing.

As a lurker, the Spider-Thing attacked MacReady and then scuttled away to the top of one of the containers.

MacReady was able to shoot it dead and then revealed the master - The Thing.

The Thing caused a further 8 wounds on MacReady and the threat level clicked over to 10 - the end of the game according to the rules but not the right place to end the scenario.  I played one more turn and between them, Blair and MacReady were able to kill The Thing.

The Leave No Stone Unturned and Get Evidence objectives were not achieved (the camera was with Windows) but the three remaining heroes did Kill the Master.  With the leader still alive, this was worth 3 + 1 = 4 victory points.  This is worth a grade 'D' - "A near thing. Not the party's proudest episode".

But I was quite happy to have succeeded with more characters alive than at the end of the movie!

I had thought about a flamethrower rule for MacReady but as the figure was holding dynamite, I expected to use the Demolition Expert trait instead.  However, unless there is more than one villain to be blown up, MacReady can do more damage hand to hand than using the dynamite - so disappointingly I ended up not using it.

There is a lot of checking with the Is That You? and Paranoia special rules.  I modified the first such that a skill check wasn't necessary if the villain had already attacked a hero.

Great to have finally got this out on the table.

Trailer: The Thing

I've had in mind gaming John Carpenter's 1982 film "The Thing" for some time.  I only saw the movie for the first time earlier this year and really enjoyed it.  Great 1980s gory creature effects and an electronic score from Ennio Morricone.

I found a great metal model of The Thing from Sally 4th.  An eight-part model plus Kurt Russell's character, the helicopter pilot R J MacReady.  Not cheap but it's a lot of lead!

I painted it with various shades of lurid pink and some fluorescent green/yellow.

But this is the final creature of the movie, so I needed to create a number of others.  The first threat in the movie is Lars the Norwegian who arrives by helicopter but with some artistic licence, I decided to use this sled and driver from Copplestone Castings.

The pack came with five huskies so I kept two back.  I painted one up normally to reflect the apparently harmless dog that Lars is chasing at the beginning of the movie, and then filed one down a second dog model to remove the hair and then painted and gloss-varnished to make it look appropriately gory.

I made a Spider Thing from the head of an old figure with legs and eyes on stalks created with soldering wire.  For the creature representing the infected Bennings, I drilled a small hole in the torso of one of my mountaineers.  The hole is hidden in the shadow beneath his binoculars allowing me to temporarily insert some pink tendrils again made from soldering wire.

Outpost 31 doesn't look that interesting in the film and I wanted a bit more colour on the gaming table so I modified a cargo container image by adding doors, windows and logos, and printed them out on card.

R J MacReady is supported by a set of Polar Adventurers, again from Copplestone Castings.

Finally, here's the short video I put together to trail my game of The Thing.

Calico

I bought a game for Louise.  It's called Calico and combines two of her favourite things: cats and quilting.  Please put your initial reaction aside and keep reading...

This is a tile-laying game with multiple ways of scoring points.  The box contains player game boards, loads of tiles with six colours and six patterns, goal tokens, buttons, and cats.

There are 10 cats with preferences for different size and shapes of quilts, from which three are selected for each game along with a random pair of patterns they prefer.

Whenever you make a set of tiles the cat likes, a small cat tile is placed on the quilt.  Similarly, if you place three tiles adjacent of the same colour, you get a button of that colour placed on the quilt.  Lastly, and most cunningly, there are 6 goal tokens of which 3 are placed on the player board for each game.  These earn further points by satisfying the condition in the six tiles around the hex e.g. six different patterns or colours, or AAA-BB-C (three of the same pattern or colour, plus two different, plus another different).  So each player can score from a combination of achieving goals, attracting cats, and sewing on buttons.

A completed quilt looks like this:

So it looks beautiful and has a fun theme, but is it any good?

Absolutely.  This game has been in high demand since its Kickstarter.  English language versions are all sold out and the second edition isn't available yet.  I couldn't wait any longer so I bought the German version and downloaded the English rules, since there is no language-specific text on any of the game elements to worry about.

With a number of different ways to score, each player has to optimise and balance the different approaches based on the tiles that are coming up, and Louise and I really enjoyed playing it.

The game mechanism could have been skinned with a range of different themes but I really like the fact that they've gone with a theme far from the usual content of board games.  It may not have been a typical Rivals purchase but the challenge and optimisation in the game makes me think it would be good Wednesday night game too.