Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 1-2 hours
The Components
E.T.I. comes in a bookshelf box that's packed to the (alien?) gills with the following components:
Boards: Each player gets a glossy player board printed on sturdy cardboard which shows his company's levels in the traits of staffing, creativity, security, and analysis. It also lists his resistance to alien threats, his stored data, and gives places to put his research cards. Overall the boards epitomize the components in E.T.I. The quality is very high: this is one of the sturdiest player boards I've seen. However they're also somewhat austere and utilitarian. There's a bit of artwork, and its attractive, but most of the board is purely mechanical.
Besides the six human boards there's also one alien co-conspirator board which only comes into use at the end of the game.
Although the large boards are all nice, they could have been produced at half-side, which would have offered some benefits, as the game takes up a lot of a table.
Tokens: There are huge piles of green tokens (used to mark levels of company improvements) and red tokens (used to mark resistance to alien threats). They're just plastic disks, but the green disks really fit with the theming of the game.
Each player also has two company tokens, which are cardboard company names placed in a plastic holder, which are again relatively utilitarian.
Finally there's a first-player token, which is a cardboard disk.
Cards: There are numerous cards included with the game. They're all printed on medium-weight glossy stock, and come in two sizes.
The 90 research cards are all half-sized cards which depict amounts of research completed (or alien threats!).
The rest of the cards are all large, square cards. These include 25 event cards, 40 project cards (in 5 tech levels), 18 agenda cards, and 10 endgame cards (used to pick human or alien players and to also provide certain benefits at end game).
Again, these cards have art that is simple and/or sparse. However, I particularly like the theming of the project cards, which lets you work on things like limb regeneration, alien linguistics, and alien vivisection in a wide variety of disiplines. The project cards also do a good job of organizing several bits of information.
Timer: A sand timer is included for negotiations in the event phase. It isn't used very much in the game, but is nice to have for when it does come up.
Rules: The rules are 12 pages, printed in somewhat plain black-and-white. They do a pretty good job of exemplifying the rules. There's also a handy flowchart included to show you the order of actions in a turn. We actually only needed to refer to it once, but it was great to have when we did.
Overall, E.T.I. has great-quality components for a surprisingly cheap price. They're also all easy to use, and if I have one complaint, it's just that the artwork is fairly sparse. Nonetheless, combining the good components with the fun (and well-executed) theming, I've given E.T.I. a "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of E.T.I. is to quickly build defensive projects to hold off the alien invasion--but unfortunately one of the players is actually an alien co-conspirator.
Setup: An alien endgame strategy is selected from among four different difficulties and then is mixed in with a set of human endgame so that there will be one card for each player. Each player then draws one secretly, discovering whether he's the alien co-conspirator or whether he has some human advantage that he can use in the endgame. (Despite being an alien co-conspirator, the alien player will work in much the same way as the other players for most of the game.)
Each player now takes a gameboard and chooses four points of improvements in the company traits of staffing, creativity, security, and analysis. Staffing helps with conducting research and the others help with submitting findings, as we'll see.
A number of Tech Level projects are laid out equal to the number of players minus one, and in order each player chooses what he'll be working on first.
Order of Play: During a turn the players all participate in the following phases:
- Draw an Event
- Choose Agendas
- Conduct Research
- Submit Findings
- Draw and Select New Projects
- Pass the First Player
Draw an Event:The first-player draws an event card. Sometimes this will be a beneficial card he can keep, sometimes it will be a benefit he can give to other players (after accepting bribes), and sometimes it will result in a vote to see who gets the benefit--with votes dependent upon completed projects.
Choose Agendas: Now each player secretly chooses what he will do this turn: conduct research, submit findings, or move to a new project. Everyone reveals simultaneously.
Conduct Research: Any player who conducted researched is given three of more research cards, based on his level of staffing and whether he has already completed any projects in the same discipline (e.g., weaponry or xeno studios). These cards are notably placed face down: a player doesn't know exactly how well his research is going.
The exception to this blind research is for companies that have spent points on the analysis company trait.This allows them to look at the first couple of cards which are laid down around their company.
Submit Findings: This is the real heart of the gameplay, when players find out how their research is going. The goal is to try and reach the difficulty listed on the project which the player has selected, which can be as low as 90 for a simple Tech Level I project like high-strength polymers to as high as 500 for a tough Tech Level V project like the Grand Unification Theory. There are two ways to submit your findings: safe or standard.
Safe means that you get 10 points per face-down card.
Standard means that you flip up all the cards and engage in a somewhat complex (but fun) calculation to see how many research points you earned. Many of the cards have values from 10-50. There are also multipliers from x0 to x3 which affect the card before it. There are additionally alien threats--abduction, spy, arson, and data virus--which remove the highest valued card after them unless you're invulnerable to the alien threat in question due to your level of security.
You can use your creativity to move around cards before you make your final calculation. Each level of creativity lets you swap two adjavent cards. This might let you move high-valued cards ahead of alien threats and/or to put multipliers together and/or next to your highest-valued cards.
Winning a Project. When you total up your points, you compare that to the difficulty of the project and the total of anyone else who was working on the same project and also sumitting their findings on the same term. If you beat the difficulty (and potentially any other players), then you the project.
Each project has a "Defense" value which will help you stay alive at the end of the game and a "Fame" value which will help you win if you stayed alive. You can additionally decide to put a project in either your Top Secret Vault ( 5 Defense) or your Public Domain Vault ( 10 Fame). Finally, most projects increase one or more of your company traits, giving you moer Staffing, Creativity, Security, and/or Analysis.
Failing a Project. If you failed to complete a project you store your research points in your Data Bank for future use, though if you failed because you were beat out by another player, you'll soon lose some of those points when you're forced to switch projects.
Draw and Select New Projects: New projects are dealt out, then each player who finished a project, was forced off a project because someone else completed it, or opted to change projects selects a new one. For those players who didn't complete a project, there are limits to how many stored research points you can carry over (though the limit is different depending on if you were "scooped" or whether you opted to change, which confused players throughout the game, but was relatively minor nonetheless).
Pass the First Player: The first-player marker now passes to the next player, and a new round begins.
Revealing the Alien: At the start of the game the players selected a game length. This now determines when the alien co-conspirator reveals himself. In a standard length game, the alien co-conspirator may reveal himself as soon as an average of 3 projects has been completed per player and by the time an average of 4 projects has been completed per player. He'll usually reveal himself as soon as he can.
When an alien is revealed, he immediately takes the project that he was working on, then converts his company board to an alien board. All the work he's done to date very elegantly moves over to alien traits. Staffing becomes ETI (estimated time to invasion). Creativity becomes Intel. Security becomes Tactics. Analysis becomes Brutality. The Alien Threats he was resistant to are now the Alien Tactics that he is best at using.
The co-conspirator's ETI stat determines how much time the other players have left to finish up their final projects. It will be somewhere between 0 and 4 more turns. Now the remaining players take this many turns, but no furter projects are put out. At the end of those rounds the alien gets to claim any projects which weren't finished.
Staging the Invasion: Now the co-conspirator stages the alien invasion. First, he places 2-4 research cards (depending on the game length) face down in front of each player. These cards now represent attacking strength, with multipliers worth 10-30 and alien threats worth 0-50 (depending on the strength of the co-conspirator and the other player in the threat).
Next the co-conspirator may reveal attack cards and/or move them around with his Tactics.
Finally he adds one extra card for every two completed projects he had, to player(s) of his chocie.
Now each human player reveals his endgame strategy, which offers him some benefits.
Finally all the attack cards are revealed. For each player the the total is added to a base score of 0-25, based on the co-conspirator's Brutality. If the attack sum exceeded the player's defense, that player's company is destroyed. If not, then they must discard projects to pay for the attack values.
If the alien co-conspirator wipes out all the human, he wins, else the player with the most Fame in surviving projects wins.
Relationships to Other Games
E.T.I. is to a certain extent a cooperative game with a hidden traitor, much like recent classic Shadows Over Camelot. However, unlike all of the other cooperative games that I've played, there is meaningful competition among the cooperating players. Cooperative games Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror both provide mechanisms whereby you can determine who "won", but I've never seen a group that particularly cared about them. However in E.T.I. the competive element is so much more forefront that it will actually be a factor, which makes it an interesting contrast to other cooperative games.
(Similarly, I think the cooperative element is much less than in these other games, but it's still there, because defeating the aliens is a first priority.)
This is just the second game from Eye-Level Entertainment, the other being the CCG-like card game, Nature of the Beast.
The Game Design
The biggest element of gameplay in E.T.I., and ultimately whether it succeeds or fails, is the whole research system. And, generally, I liked it quite a bit. As I said, it results in slightly complex calculations, but is quite a lot of fun. In particular the way that the company traits interact with the research is innovative and allows several paths to victory. One player can be sitting around with a good analysis, and thus submit his findings when he knows that he has enough points, another player can depend on luck offset by his security against alien threats. Staffing allows victory through sheer numbers, while creativity really shows off how cool the research system is by allowing a player to move things around. These traits all allow for very different gameplay in a system that's generally unlike any mechanic I've seen before.
There are also minor elements of bluffing and simultaneous action in E.T.I., as you decide which of the three actions to take each turn, but at least in our game they weren't a major element.
The balance between cooperation and competition is, as I've already noted, pretty original. However, I'm not entirely convinced that the balance works perfectly. In particular the amount of cooperation that happens can be pretty minimal, and when you get to the alien invasion at the end, he isn't going to have much of a chance against a larger group of players, given that he has to wipe them all out. These elements cause E.T.I. to pale a bit from the strategic side of things, but only a little bit--and it's still a very fine experiential game in any case.
Overall the game works smoothly with turns going quickly and everyone constantly making interesting decisions. Problems are minor, though there are some "sharp" edges, as is often the case in indie games, such as the problem with the penalties for switching projects that I've already mentioned. Finally, it should be noted that there is a notable random element in the game, thanks to the research system itself, which individual players can decide whether they like or not.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed E.T.I. quite a bit, especially for its theming and its clever and original systems. It's the sort of game that I'd love to play with my more casual groups who enjoy roleplaying, and which I might be able to convince serious gamers to try out. I've given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance: very good.
Conclusion
E.T.I. is an enjoyable, innovative, and well-themed game of alien invasion. It's at best a semi-cooperative game, but there is still some feeling of working against an alien threat; contrariwise the competitive systems are interesting and fully featured. E.T.I. is well-recommended to casual gamers who enjoy American offerings and does have enough thoughtful gamers to please a Eurogamer--if they don't mind a large dash of random risk and reward.
