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The Thing board game Infection at Outpost 31 is returning this autumn

Why don't we just wait here for a little while?

Infection at Outpost 31, the board game adaptation of John Carpenter’s cult horror movie The Thing, is making a return later this year.

The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 was originally released in 2017 as the first tabletop release from pop-culture studio Mondo, as part of a partnership with the Project Raygun division of licensed board game maker The Op (then known as USAopoly).

The movie board game retells the events of the 1982 film, as four to eight players take on the roles of researchers stranded in the Antarctic with a deadly shape-shifting alien. The group of players must sweep the station, complete missions and ultimately escape in a helicopter. Making things harder are hidden traitors, who can sabotage the humans’ efforts to make it out alive by destroying rooms and impeding other actions if they remain undetected.

The dozen playable characters include familiar faces from the film - notably Kurt Russell’s MacReady and Keith David’s Childs - with the map providing a top-down view of the entire outpost. True to the paranoia of the movie, players can equip themselves with weapons such as a flamethrower and dynamite, and even tie up suspected imitations and test their blood as they try to weed out the alien horrors among them - if even a single imitation makes it onto the helicopter, the players (and humanity) lose.

Cover image for YouTube video

Following its release in October 2017, Infection at Outpost 31 eventually went out-of-print, making it expensive to track down a copy online - multiple copies are listed on eBay for north of $300.

Mondo announced during the weekend’s online Comic-Con@Home event that The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 would be reprinted this autumn. The re-release will be identical to the first print run of the game’s standard edition in terms of gameplay, artwork and contents, with the only change being the back of the box. The game will cost $60, the same price as the original release.

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The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31

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Matt Jarvis avatar

Matt Jarvis

Editor-in-chief

After starting his career writing about music, films and video games for various places, Matt spent many years as a technology, PC and video game journalist before writing about tabletop games as the editor of Tabletop Gaming magazine. He joined Dicebreaker as editor-in-chief in 2019, and has been trying to convince the rest of the team to play Diplomacy since.

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