Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
If you asked me many moons ago whether the horror genre would be a good fit for a party game, my answer would have been a straight-up no. Sure, Murdery Mystery party games exist, but horror is on another level. Horror has a body count, and it ain’t no lead pipe in the library nonsense here. The corpses, more often than not, don’t remain particularly intact.
Yet three years ago, I did take a look at the Scream board game by the now-defunct Funko Games. It was a surprisingly fun game that somehow made a real-time set-collecting card game with an app work. Not exactly the best game I’d ever played, but it was different, and more importantly, it was good enough to hit the table quite a few times at my local game meetups.
So when I heard about This Game is Killer (great name!), which could handle up to 10 players, lasted around 15 minutes, and used the Aliens franchise as its setting, curiosity got the better of me. And since I’m no cat, I wasn’t too worried about where that curiosity might lead.
Wake From Cryosleep
The premise of the game is pretty simple: there is an alien on board causing problems, as aliens tend to do, and you want to survive. When I say you, I mean you, you, not your fellow players sitting at the table. They’re expendable. This ain’t no cooperative game.
Each round starts with everyone drawing two cards. All cards have a location and a text effect. You play one card at a time, choosing either the location or the text effect. The interesting bit is the turn order. It’s a snake draft, so the first player goes, then play moves clockwise until it reaches the last player. It then reverses direction and moves counter-clockwise back around the table.
The trick here is the order you play your cards. Do you play a location first, or a text effect? Making that declaration is part of the fun, especially when you learn that a good portion of the cards are meant to screw other players. Shoot players that are in the same room as you, destroy a room, or have 0 priority, meaning the Alien will attack other players who are in the same room as you. Some even offer alternative ways to win.
Once the locations and effects are fired off, the Alien attacks. A row of facedown location cards determines where it will strike, with one flipped over to reveal which location it will munch on. If a single player is there, they’re dead. Multiple? Only the player with the highest priority number dies, and everyone else is off the hook. The Alien will not attack the same location again until all the other locations have been struck, making it easy to manage.
Game Over, Man
There are a few other rules sprinkled in, but that’s the crux of the experience. You have two cards, each with a location and a text effect, and you use them to try to survive. The game can also end prematurely by having the Alien killed by destroying a location they are attacking. It’s a very simple concept with an even simpler ruleset. Right?
This had to be one of the hardest games I had to review. I play games several times to get a feel for what the designer was trying to accomplish and evaluate how well they pulled it off. This Game Is Killer: Alien on Board was challenging because, quite simply, neither my game group nor I found the game very interesting. Worse, there were times when I found it confusing.
Before I get into my tiny rant, let’s talk about party games for a second. Party games need to be stupid simple. A good litmus test for this is whether the game is playable even when intoxicated. You can easily play Uno drunk. Same goes with Codenames. Telestrations might even work as well, albeit way more challenging and perhaps more entertaining. Hues & Cues fits into this box perfectly. This Game Is Killer: Alien on Board does not pass this test. It’s too simple for the average gamer, yet too complex for people who don’t play board games.
This rulebook? Missing important details. Some cards will cause awkward interactions, and the rulebook isn’t specific about their impact. Questions immediately arose in our first game.
In Space, No One Hears the Rules
For example, there’s a card that gives everyone in the same location Priority 4. Okay, but what happens when multiple players are there? Does the Alien kill all of them? Just one? If it’s only one, which player? The rulebook doesn’t say. So instead of playing the game, we’re suddenly playing a completely different game: guess what the designer meant.
It doesn’t help that the card effects are a little too cute, being “flavorful” with a side order of ambiguity. The game tries to mix narrative language into its instructions, which is an absolute recipe for confusion, especially for players who aren’t familiar with board games. Card effects are instructions, not stories, and should be treated as such.
There are also bits of complexity that exist simply for their own sake. Take the “Last On Board” rule. When only one player remains, they must survive one more round and play a card marked “Last On Board,” which has its own narrative text.
Why?
Just let the player win and be done with it. I wouldn’t normally rant about something this small, but it adds more text to the cards, and almost every single time I’ve played with these new players, they have asked questions about it. Friction on top of friction.
Even after understanding the game and getting a few sessions under our belt, This Game Is Killer: Alien on Board never became particularly engaging. Yes, it’s short, but the experience is largely devoid of drama or build-up. Things just happen.
The Perfect Organism? Not Quite
The Alien can effectively die in the first round because the randomly selected location happens to be destroyed by another player. Some games can end prematurely, especially when a particular card allows a single player to win outright. Other times, the game overstays its welcome, with two players running around the ship for several turns without much happening. There’s a distinct lack of escalation that dominates throughout the game.
What’s frustrating about writing all of this is that I want to love this game. The concept of having cards serve as both location and special effect is interesting, especially when you play one card at a time with turn order influencing your plan. The goal of survival at all costs is simple and invites players to engage with each other, and not in a friendly way. There is a genuinely solid foundation here, and I know that because I did have a few good sessions with the game. The problem is consistency. Too often, the outcome feels like a ten-minute coin flip.
I wanted this one to work. Aliens is practically begging to be turned into a nasty little party game, and This Game Is Killer has enough good ideas to make it work. After playing this many times scattered throughout different groups, it felt more like tolerance due to the lack of tension. It’s a game with a great elevator pitch and never quite figured out what to do once everyone got on the elevator.
There’s a fun game hiding in here somewhere. Unfortunately, the Alien keeps killing it before we get to play it.
