This Review is HARMLESS – A This Game Is KILLER Review

Alien as a party game.

As David St. Hubbins epitaph reads, “…and why not?”

Arriving at a perfect time alongside the excellent Alien: Romulus, designer Ivan Turner’s This Game Is KILLER presents a brutal and humorous take on Ridley Scott’s classic science fiction film. It does so in a violent 15 minutes while supporting up to 10 participants. That deafening sound you hear is the syncopation of klaxons and human wailing.

This is indeed a party game. It’s not social deduction. You’re all crew members of the NSS Ganymede fighting for your lives amid the turmoil of an aggressive foreign lifeform. Players die, often, and those with playful spirits respond with laughter. It’s mirthful with an edge, the kind of game that elicits devious grins but also admirable loyalty.

Part of the charm is that the structure is simple. Each round the surviving players are dealt two cards. Each card has two possible purposes: to either be played for the listed room or for the text effect. As play goes ’round, you must slap one of the two down on the table and either declare the location where you are hiding this turn, or you must announce the action you are triggering and its associated effect. You then play your other card for the opposite purpose when you take your second turn in the round.

This is simple and your agency is limited. You have up to two possible effects and two locations to choose from. Sometimes your decision space is even more cramped, as you may receive two cards with the same location or ability. From this extremely pared down space beauty emerges.

Firstly, your location is of importance because the alien will randomly appear in one of the ship’s rooms and eviscerate a player there. The dangerous spaces are not entirely unknown, as the locations the predator has previously stalked are no longer on the table, at least not until it’s checked off the other locales on its bucket list and the alien cards are reshuffled.

So, there’s this narrowing down of deadly scope. It offers the tease that elicits hunches and inspired predictions of where the alien will strike next. This is important because you want to blow the mother out the airlock.

The bite resides in the card actions. Turner doesn’t hold back, offering wild options such as sealing off the bridge and jettisoning the xenomorph into the vacuum of space. You can open fire with a machinegun and blast apart a room. Or perhaps you take an alternative route and crawl into a cryo-tank trying to wait out the storm. There are many options, often heinous.

Here’s the perhaps obvious twist: this isn’t a cooperative game. At best, it’s a semi-coop, and I’m not even sure that’s accurate. Some of the cards that fell the alien result in the remaining crew winning. Others point to a solo victory for the player that executed the action. The game’s incentives and agency hang together with the flayed sinew of a dozen corpses.

The best bit is that many cards have a last remaining player option, effectively offering an easier path to victory if you are the only one left alive. This is great, it offers the dramatic ability to come back from the brink and set the menacing terror aflame. There’s a subtlety here that players pick up on rather quickly. The game is much easier to win if you’re that lone survivor sneaking about the freighter.

Naturally, this leads to wanton destruction. Maybe punching the red button and suffocating everyone in the shuttle bay is alright. Yeah, the xenomorph didn’t end up there this turn, but now you’re that much closer to being the lone survivor. Butch just lit up the med lab and gunned down Meyer anyway, so who’s going to cast the first stone.

It’s a race to the bottom. Hazards of the job.

Once this aggressive philosophy emerges, the game evolves and offers new angles. You start to really consider whether you want to reveal your room first or your action. It can be beneficial to delay your action until you’ve seen others play some cards, but committing to a room early can put you at risk. Maybe you even try to speak up and bargain with the others. It gets twitchy and you start watching your back as well as your front.

It’s such a clean design that there’s not much here to criticize from a technical perspective. By its very nature, it’s a fleeting game. While I do recall several moments that occurred in recent plays, it’s not the type of thing that builds legend. It’s a very quick jab in the chin. It’s something that captures attention and offers venom without the lasting scars. But it’s also tremendous fun with the right group. Like a jolt of sugar to the bloodstream, it fabricates moments of tension and delight, even if the rush is short-lived.

I’m also surprised how impervious it is to player count. Many games of this ilk don’t stand up to smaller group-sizes. While this one certainly delivers with a full house, I have enjoyed it substantially in the lowers as well. The design is forced to function at a high degree with a reduced number of players, as bodies drop so fast that it can winnow the group down to a minute number rather quickly. Thus, it’s a robust design by necessity.

While I’m pleased with this game and the cutting experience it offers, it’s obvious there are whole segments of the hobby that will find this thing absolutely dreadful. Agency is limited and respite is brief. Another player can off you in the first turn. If you don’t find humor or tension there, it could feel like a complete waste of a quarter-hour.

This game is indeed, killer. It echoes the themes found in the alien franchise, highlighting that the humans are just as vacuous and self-serving as the creatures that torment them. This is a fun, sort of freewheeling experience that operates in the same universe as the beloved Hellapagos – a party game about starving, shooting, and eating fellow survivors on a desert island. This Game is KILLER doesn’t quite offer the same dramatic turns and variety of outcomes as that title, but it does capture the same sense of desperation, betrayal, and triumph.

I don’t expect this one to electrify anyone’s spine or to emerge as an all-timer. It just doesn’t have the footprint or momentum to capture widespread attention. That’s perfectly fine. I have found and will continue to find this little despoiler thrilling. It’s a clever game that hits vindictively.

 

A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher.

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