"Sucking Vacuum" is an excellently produced board game that is well worth the $20 USD it sells for. Imagine a game that crosses Space Hulk with the TV hit "Survivor" -- all the tense, gritty action of the former with all the whining, posing, back-stabbing intrigue of the latter. That's Sucking Vacuum in a nutshell.
The game is set aboard the International Space Station, which, after years of multinational malfeasance and neglect, has started coming apart. Whipping out their slide rules and TI calculators, the crew of three-to-six scientists suddenly realizes that there is only one escape pod -- and it has only two seats.
Let the backstabbing begin.
Each player controls an astronaut, and must travel around the space station collecting pieces of a space suit, weapons to clobber other players with, and special items that will give them an edge as they attempt to outweasel everyone else. Sound pretty tame? Consider the fact that part of the station has been exposed to the cold, airless vacuum of space, and that, as more doors are opened by desperate crewmembers, the rest of the air aboard the ISS will soon be waving bye-bye as it bleeds out of the wounded station. Pretty soon, the players are trying to accomplish their missions while holding their breath. Oxygen, in fact, is the controlling mechanism of the game; as you race around looking for that darned pair of spacesuit pants, you're burning up oxygen, which you must replenish at one of the station's O2 canisters. Every action uses up a little more of your O2, and if you run out -- you're sucking vacuum. Now you have no choice but to crawl to an air canister and take a good deep breath.
But wait -- there's more.
Can't find those space pants? No problem -- your respected scientific colleague over there has a pair. Take the baseball bat you just found and go clobber 'em until they're gasping for breath, crawling piteously towards the nearest air canister. Now take the darn pants from their oxygen-starved hands and go looking for the next item you need. The game authors, who are probably out on parole now after that incident with the kittens and the lighter fluid, want you to stab your buddy in the back. So they have provided a slew of improvised weapons -- baseball bats, fire extinguishers, a dead cat -- that you can use to pound the air out of your fellow scientists' lungs, rendering them vulnerable to your filching fingers.
Because, hey -- there's no "explosive decompression" in "team", now is there?
To win, a pair of players must get to the escape pod with complete spacesuits, but only after the pod has been fueled up using the Fuel Pod Floppy Disk ( which can be used on IBM-compatibles only -- don't even try using it on that LINUX machine in the control room ) . I say a pair of players because the escape pod takes two people to fly it -- unless one player finds the special Autopilot robot, which will let him, her, or it ( one of the player markers is a chimp ) escape by him-, her-, or itself. The rest of you losers will have to suck vacuum, baby.
Physically, Sucking Vacuum is impressively produced, with beautiful artwork adorning eighteen map tiles, seventy-nine counters, ten character pieces, and some other assorted gewgaws. The artwork on the map tiles even surpasses that of GW's Space Hulk tiles, and reinforces the tongue-in-cheek feel of the game: strewn about the station are such kitsch references as the EVA pod from 2001, the Power Lifter and a facehugger from Aliens, one of Dr. Who's Daleks, Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, a "Powered by LINUX" poster, a book in the Science Lab titled "Dissecting Cute Fuzzy Animals for Fun and Profit", the "Orbital Mind Control Laser Operator's Manual", a Klingon dictionary, a "Quantum Temporal Mechanics for Dummies" book, a Klingon bat'leth, a poster of Spock, Han Solo frozen in carbonite, etc., ad nauseum. The art designers, in addition to being talented artists, show definite signs of having played Fallout, which is one of the supreme masters of kitsch references. While the feel of the game reminds me of the entrepreneurial stylings of the old Metagaming bagged games of the late 70's, the production values here easily rival those of Milton-Bradley or GW. The only improvement I could see would be to have the tiles and counters printed on a thicker grade of cardboard, but that's a very minor detail.
The game also has a lot of potential for repeat game play, as the board consists of map tiles ( akin to Space Hulk and Heroquest ) , which means that the ISS will be different every time. The publishers have also included a set of expansion rules and counters with the game, allowing you to move on from the basic rules to ones pitting the human crew against Grey Aliens who are trying to capture everyone and stuff them aboard their flying saucer; apparently, the thousands of abductions and anal probes they've done already just haven't satisfied 'em. Darn dirty aliens.
So for $20 USD, which is less than a tank of gas or two large pizzas these days, you can have hours of fun, enjoyment, and good-natured treachery in groups of three-to-six people. The game encourages players to adopt the accent of whatever country they'd like their astronaut to be from; this is the International Space Station, after all, and that same spirit of overacting permeates the game play. It's a hoot, and you'll enjoy it immensely.
But watch out for the chimp. The chimp won every game we played, the first night we tried it.
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boardgamegeek.com/game/4606
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