Combine it with Clue. Colonel Mustard becomes a flesh eating alien!

Hmm… The addition of a board is an interesting idea, and Clue would actually work pretty well with sufficient relabeling. But a board encourages certain things, mechanically–like “they can’t get me if I stay away from everyone else.” I think I want things more claustrophobic than that.

Hmm, the “stay away from everyone else” element would be quite powerfully countered if alien players had free, easy remote attacks (which perhaps mops up a lot of the problems of the secret-killer boardgame genre) - if you’re out digging the snow on your own, and the Doc is holed up in the supply shed on the other side of the compound, you should be allowed to quickly slither through the air vents and consume him, given that nobody else can see either of you.

Any thoughts for a secret messaging system? Lifting the red/black card system from The Things might be a nice simple option, with the card exchanging only being done whenever two or more players were alone; that it presumably wouldn’t come up very much, and would be a boringly compulsory “oh, yeah, suppose we should swap a card” when it did.

Might even work okay if everyone just starts with a hand of five cards and keep them throughout the game - that the Queen Thing can choose to “top up” the other Things with extra red cards if she wants them to go on and infect others.

The existence of the Things depending on the actions of the players sounds fun - perhaps allowing players to swap their hand for five new cards (drawn from a deck that’s built from randomly-stacked groups of five, half black and half red) whenever they agree that something potentially-infecting has happened to somebody, if you’re being freeform about it.

But yes, was a shame about the BlogNomic dynasty dying to a boring loophole. Approaching the genre again from a roleplaying angle sounds good.

So if nobody is a Thing, what exactly happens during the course of the game?

“Yup. Life sure is fun here in this artic research station.”

(three hours later)

“Good job, everyone!”

If nobody is a Thing, then the game mechanics somehow make the players suspicious to the point that they kill each other accidentally. The trick is to somehow discover that there are in fact no Things, and you’re just going crazy from being in Antarctica.

Heh. Good question. I’m imagining that each player gets a nonsecret character and a secret goal, and must pursue both that goal and, y’know, staying alive. Becoming a Thing replaces the ’staying alive’ goal (with ‘make them Things’), but not necessarily the first (eg ‘ruin Lambeck’s reputation’).

At certain conflict points, two or more players resolve tests against a pool of dice or a deck of cards, and all such tests have three results:

1) Which character succeeds at a subgoal (eg “I want to get past you, out of the door”).

2) Which player succeeds at a supergoal (eg “… because I want to escape”). Does not need to correspond with (1); you might fail to get out the door, but get out the window instead, or, conversely, get out the door and sprain your ankle.

3) A secret result indicating, to each participating player, whether he or she is now a Thing. The chance of this happening ex nihilo is zero, but is increased by in-game actions (”I punch you into the shelf of petri dishes”) or if one character is already a Thing.

Furthermore, every time there’s any conflict, a die or a face-down card goes into the “real or not?” stack. That stack is revealed or rolled at the end of the game, climbing up a gradient scale, like:

0 black cards: No Things. Anybody believing he or she is a Thing went stir-crazy. Tragic, really.

2 black cards: Extraterrestrial life is real, but it didn’t infect anyone. See above.

5 black cards: “My God! We need triage here! And… make sure to strap them down…”

10 black cards: Cthulhoid tentacles explode from the shattered lab, snapping up screaming rescuers and dragging them toward its gaping maw.

Of course, the optimal strategy for survival is to avoid conflict, but that makes it very difficult to achieve your secret goal (and thus win). Any player can declare a conflict if two other characters look like they’re getting into one (this can be vetoed, but only by a four-person vote). Also, one of the secret goals (which may or may not be drawn by anyone) is “You’re a Thing; make them Things,” so at least one person may be pushing for it no matter what.

“I simply MUST have a date with Sally. Perhaps if I were to EAT EVERY OTHER MAN IN THE STATION! Blarghraghgrarh.”

This can get quite like Paranoia, with players ‘proving’ the Thing-ness of their rivals and then killing them.

If there’s no board, how do you keep track of the research station?

A Clue-style board wouldn’t work because of the absurdity in the travel times — but what if you loosened those travel times? If it was possible to cross a large part of the map in one turn (perhaps by forgoing other actions) then you could get the paranoia of isolation as well as the ability for all the other charaters to come running when they hear the crash.

That makes me think that simulateous turns would be a good idea.

Unrelated idea: Diplomacy’s “talk phase/board phase” could be a good mechanic for the secret goal. You have the catty lab politics in the talk phase (which could also double as a means for an infection mechanic maybe?), and then you act on the bitchy infighting in the board phase.

Zaratustra: exactly. Some of the characters’ special abilities will have to do with persuading other characters to get on their side of a debate… which may be as deadly as some other special abilities (which will have to do with flamethrowers).

Will: Hmm. I probably will not end up using a Clue board; instead, the game may have a set of maps (Arctic station 1, orbital station 2, undersea station 3) with specific things in common, and guidelines for creating your own. The size of the board doesn’t matter; the qualities of certain areas, and which other areas they are connected to, does.

Most of the RPGs I play handle bitching and punching the same way, as actions that drive a conflict, but the idea of distinct phases is interesting. Maybe long stretches of “free phase,” during which players could accrete cards or dice; followed by some player’s declaration of a conflict, entering “conflict phase;” and, after the test is resolved, “resolution phase,” after which the game returns to free phase.

Simultaneous turns are interesting too. The problem is that I imagine a lot of conflicts being rooted in arguments, which tend to be back-and-forth, making a normal turn structure a natural fit. Maybe the buildup of the conflict goes by turns, with players setting out dice or cards as needed, until test resolution, which happens simultaneously (ie everybody turns over cards together).

It seems to me like the Mafia Game covers a lot of the ground that this needs to include. Combining elements of it with a gameboard approach would be interesting, in that players can be ‘infected’ (or not) on the gameboard, and thus elimination must be rooted in the game board as well; calls for a player to be killed can be made at any time, but are time- and location-specific (i.e. all players wishing to vote over the mater of Kevan’s execution need to be in the lab within five turns), so that careful planning can prevent other players from making it to the execution vote in time (e.g. if Will is in the radar tower, min. 6 dice rolls away).

The problem with the Mafia game is that it doesn’t really allow for resistance to execution; as such, it would have to be adapted to include a combat model. That wouldn’t be so difficult, though. In fact, votes weighted by the quality of ‘weapon’ cards would do the job quite neatly.

I still think that there’s too little incentive for characters to spend time close to each other, however. Over the course of three hours, I feel that the players would need some better reason, or somebetter variety of reasons, to mix in each others’ company than constant fear of remote attack. Ideally, I suppose, the maps would simply have one less location than the total number of players.