Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space is the perfect case study of a good game idea getting totally mangled by inept design. If its disaster of a title doesn’t completely scare you off (seriously, did it take four people to come up with that?), then what’s waiting for you inside the box likely will: a clunky, tedious hidden movement/social deduction game without a single interesting element to its implementation beyond the marriage of those two genres. Encumbered by a turgid pace, monotonous cadence, and chaotic decision space — not to mention its necessitation of copious amounts of straight up guesswork — Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space ultimately adds up to merely a much more complicated (and much more irritating) riff on the widely-maligned, yet seemingly perennial Battleship.
Like many a bad game before it, Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space sounds thrilling on paper. A social deduction game where the goal is to escape a failing spaceship, and half the players are secretly murderous aliens who really just want to slaughter everyone? Awesome! And all movement is hidden in order to simulate a ship-wide power outage? Double awesome!! Yeah, if only. How the game works is every player gets a personal map of the ship which they use to track their own movement and any information they might have on the whereabouts of others. The maps are split into white and gray hexagonal spaces, where white represents a “Silent Sector” and gray a “Dangerous Sector”. Players take turns moving secretly about the ship by jotting down which sector they are currently in on their maps. Human players can move only one space per turn, while aliens can move up to two. The catch is that each time a player ends their movement, they must make a verbal declaration to the rest of the table. If they end their movement in a silent sector they must say as much, thus informing the others that they are currently on a white space (not very silent, is it?). If instead they end on a dangerous sector they draw a card from a massive pile that sits in the center of the table. The card they draw will have one of four effects: 1) force them to announce the exact sector they are currently in, 2) force them to announce any sector of their choosing, 3) force them to announce silence in all sectors (notably — and confusingly — different than announcing that they are IN a silent sector), or 4) earn them an item they can use at a later time if they are human. Oh yeah, and if you draw an item you also must announce silence in all sectors. Alongside these effects, alien players have an additional option after ending their movement: announcing an attack in their current sector. If any other player is in that location — alien or human — they immediately perish, and any ex-humans start their next turn as a fledgling alien.
It’s obvious what the game is trying to do: create a suspenseful experience by making the human players increasingly paranoid as they slowly make their way toward escape pods as they draw cards that may force them to reveal their location, all the while giving the alien players a satisfying challenge in puzzling out where the humans are hiding. However, the design problems here are too numerous and too opaque for this intent to ever shine through. Let’s start with the fact that this is a social deduction game in which neither the social or deductive elements matter. For human players because there’s literally no way for them to work together, and thus no reason to even care who the other players are. For alien players because they are actually better off just revealing themselves as early as possible, so they can start coordinating their movements immediately and don’t accidentally kill each other. Even if you wanted to keep your identity hidden you basically can’t. The moment a human uses an item or an alien makes an attack their secret is out, further amplifying the “What’s the point?” feel of it all. This must be the most poorly thought out social deduction game I’ve played since Saboteur.
And that is far from the end of Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space‘s problems. Another key aspect of social deduction designs, bluffing, completely falls flat as well because the meta here is as shallow as it gets, boiling down to “Did that person just lie about which location they are in?” being basically the only question to even consider about other player’s actions. Movement is also a slow, arduous process — especially for humans. Move one space, draw a card and do what it says. Move one space, draw a card and do what it says. Over and over again, making the game feel like it’s taking forever even when it ends up wrapping up in a mere half hour. Even worse, let’s say you do finally manage to get to an escape pod after 25 minutes of relentless tedium. Imagine this: you have to draw a random card to see if the escape pod even works. Is that an insane idea or what? Four designers and not one of them was able to tell how horrible of an idea that is? I don’t understand it.
I’m not even going to get into what the items do, or for that matter the individual character abilities that I have completely neglected to mention until now. None of them are interesting (“This human starts where the alien starts, oh wow!”), and even if they were that would not address how busted the core design of the game is. Even its winning conditions are busted to the point of being nonsensical. I’m not exaggerating. Let’s follow the rules as they are written in the rulebook: any human that manage to escape the space ship “is a winner”, and the aliens win as a group “if they can eliminate the last living human on board the space ship”. The game doesn’t end when a human player escapes, and human players become alien players when they are killed. So who the heck loses? Only the very last human that gets killed? Aliens that were unfortunate enough to get team-killed? The aliens obviously lose if every human manage to escape, but I have legitimately never seen that happen. It also says in the rulebook that any humans still on board the ship after 40 turns automatically lose and the aliens win? What sense does that make? The aliens are the ones that failed to hunt them down. Ugh, what a disaster. I’m sorry, but when a committee of four can’t even devise sensible winning conditions that says a lot about how lacking their individual abilities as designers are.
So it goes that every aspect of Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space is a clumsy, tedious chore — which is a real shame. What makes it doubly frustrating is that I could easily see a game with the same theme and in the same mechanical genre earning a permanent place in my collection next to Fury Of Dracula or Deception: Murder In Hong Kong. It is no surprise to me that despite coming out an entire decade ago, this remains the sole published title by all four of its designers. Everything about it screams amateur hour, right down to its rather embarrassing title. While I have no idea what any of these once game designers are doing with their lives these days, if any of them do happen to pop their head back into the tabletop ring at some point I only hope that ten additional years of life experience is enough to elevate their next effort to something more than a tawdry disappointment.
Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.