This game has it almost everything: heroic, capable humans; vicious, hungry aliens; and no guarantee that your escape pod will fire, if you're able to reach it at all.
It's only missing one thing.
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Escape from Etc. is a competitive team game... mostly. Kind of. There are human and alien sides, at least. Everyone has a secret role, however, and nobody knows who's on what team except through contextual clues during the game. Only the aliens are a team—the humans are all competing for the escape pods, so helping each other isn't useful except in edge cases, while the aliens are all trying to eliminate the humans—but it's entirely possible for one alien to kill another.
Quick overview: each player gets a dry-erase map and a marker. They keep track of their own movements step by step, and track the enemies in whatever way they want. Humans move one space per turn; aliens move one or two. Ending your turn on a silent (white) sector doesn't trigger anything. Ending it on a dangerous (gray) sector makes you draw a danger card, which could force you to reveal your location (or not, or give a false location). Aliens who aren't careful can give away their identities by moving multiple sectors on early turns and then giving away their locations. That's not necessarily bad; only one human role, the soldier, can attack during the game without an item card that allows it, and aliens don't want to kill other aliens. Having the other players determine your location is a bigger problem than your identity, which sort of makes sense (OH GOD IT'S THE ALIEN RUN).
There are roles for each human and alien, with a special ability assigned to each role. In addition, there are items that can be collected, though only used by humans (aliens keep them to mask their identities). Combined with the eight different maps, this game has a ton of replayability; it's unlikely in the extreme that you ever come across an identical, or even similar, combination of roles and items in any two games. It's Alien Blood Battleship, and it's set up to be awesome.
What's missing is the awesome.
The concept is great. The ideas put into the concept are great. But the game is, at best, amusing; it's not really much fun.
Here's why, as far as I can tell: in every piece of media that depicts this kind of situation—group of humans versus invading force of others—the goal of the humans is to work together to overcome or escape the enemy. Anyone who goes against this goal, preferring instead to save themselves at all costs, is the traitor. In games, the traitor's success depends on the players, but in movies the traitor almost always dies, because the traitor is an asshole.
In this game, everyone is a traitor. It's philosophically correct to say that because everyone is working for their own benefit and nobody has a reason to team up, there are no traitors, but that doesn't matter. You're thrown into a situation where we're all trained to think of the humans as needing to band together to survive, not flee like selfish roaches. Sure, it's funny when the aliens eat each other, and it's nice to escape and win, but if you lose as a human, there's no sense of moral victory, there's no team goal you were a part of. You were the food. Period. And while that may play truest to how this type of scenario would run with real people and real... aliens, it's a depressing game experience.
What about if the aliens lose? Well, grasshopper, one other strange thing is that it's extremely difficult for the aliens to lose. Or, maybe it is. That's not a question which should have an unclear answer.
The aliens live "when the last human dies". What's strange about this definition is that, taken literally, if it's 4v4 and the aliens kill the last human after the other three escape, they win (as do the three humans who made it out). However, if the aliens kill three humans and the last escapes after that, they lose. Was that intended? If so, it makes no sense. If not, then it basically means the aliens win if they have any people to feed on. If it's 1v1, there's a winner and a loser. If it's 4v4, there are the people who escape and the aliens who almost certainly will meet some version of their win condition.
You bust this game out and it seems like it has to be a good time. Then it might be. Or not. Meh.
Score: Five winners out of eight whatevers on the ship.
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