In “Escape From the Aliens in Outer Space,” your group plays a collection of scientists stranded on a dying space station. Half of you are humans, moving one hex at a time in search of the nearest escape pod. The other half? Bloodthirsty aliens who move up to two spaces a turn and whose only goal is to successfully eat all humans on the map. Get eaten as a human, and you get to respawn on the board as a monster yourself. Get eaten by a fellow alien, though, and your night is over.
Rather than operate on a centralized game board, players are handed one of eight laminated booklets and a dry-erase marker. Each game starts with the players agreeing on a shared game board, which varies in layout and difficulty depending on the size of your group and the experience level of your players. From there, your group will take turns moving around the map and tracking their paths on their private player boards.
Your movement will land you on one of two types of hexes. Secured Sectors do not require you to share any information with your opponents — you just announce that no noise has been heard this turn. Conversely, landing in a Dangerous Sector requires you to push your luck with the Dangerous Sector deck. Draw a white card, and you will tell the other players that there is no noise in your sector. Draw a red card, and you will be forced to reveal your exact location on the map. But draw a green card — the Noise In Any Sector card — and you can announce a sound anywhere on the map.
Thus, “Escape From the Aliens in Outer Space” is equal parts social deduction and pattern recognition. As you move around the map, you will constantly feed your group a combination of truths and lies about your location — and, reading between the lines, your intention towards the other players on the map. Reveal yourself as an alien too soon, and the human players will flee each sector you reveal. But reveal yourself too late, and you run the risk of eating other aliens you thought might’ve been humans.