Game Review: E.T.I.: Estimated Time to Invasion

By W. Eric Martin
January 15, 2008

Publisher: Eye-Level Entertainment
Designers: Matthew and Mark Anticole
Players: 3-6
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Rules Language: English

Version: Production copy
Times Played: Three, twice with six players and once with four

Aliens are invading—again. Don’t aliens have anything better to do than invade Earth? Couldn’t they just swing by for a movie, maybe swap music clips or share photos? Friend me on Facebook? Personally I don’t have anything against the aliens—other than that they keep trying to enslave us, natch—but I’m getting a little tired of trying to defend them when friends and neighbors start yammering on about the invasions yet again. I get it, okay: Aliens bad, humans good.

Anyway, the aliens, as you probably gathered, are invading. They’re bored, they’re young, they’re looking for hotter honeys than the three-tentacled ones waiting at home. Whatever—they’re invading, and us Earthlings have to fight them off. While some of you might want to turn to guns and other weapons, I’ll just let you know that they’re not going to work. You see, the aliens are coming down towards us through the atmosphere. To shoot them, you have to aim straight up—and if you miss, the bullets or rockets or what have you will arc back to Earth and kill a bunch of people. That’s how I understand it anyway, so guns are right out.

Instead let’s think about science. Science has to be good for something other than controlling the frog population, right? In fact, let’s just pretend the aliens are all frogs and dissect the viscera right out of them. Before we can do that, though, we’ll need to conduct research, lots and lots of research. Research by the ream. We’ll lay out our fancy reports and findings, sometimes in a backwater journal that’s meant more to boost our chances of tenure than to effect change, but when we know we have something good—or just want to take a chance—we’ll ship it out to Ye Olde NY Times and pay off some intern to blast it across the front page in 16 point type and hope that the stats hold up in the end so that we don’t look like chumps. If we do, I’m blaming you.

Luckily for us, someone’s laid the groundwork for research projects and is giving us some direction into what will work against the otherworldly invaders. There’s not enough projects for every forager of facts, mind you, so some four-eyed Smedley is going to earn a major league wedgie before getting shipped to another pie-in-the-sky project.

Thanks to a David Brin wannabe who hangs around campus throwing out research brainstorms like candy wrappers, there’s no end to the research projects we can work on. Once a project is claimed by some group or other, a new project comes online. It might require more research than earlier ones, but if so, that’s a good thing. The not-Brin Brin is getting better at figuring out what’s going to smash the Greenies, after all, so these research projects are going to provide us with more and more defense as time goes on, not to mention all the style points we’ll score for looking our best while saving humanity from a crushing body blow. Of course style matters only if we’re not living under the heel of a methane-breathing master, so let’s keep ourselves focused on defense for the most part.

That early warning system we spent forty trillion dollars on to plant out in a Plutoland has served us well, meaning that we have time to ramp up the research and finish up on several projects before the aliens start getting within arm’s reach.

Problem is, we’ve got word that one of the researchers has a secret crush on the aliens and think he can butter them once they land on Earth. He’s going to greet them with chocolates and flowers, and they’ll return the favor by turning his brain into glue. That’s what I envision anyway. Maybe I’m wrong, and they’ll get along like magic. I had a cat once who befriended mice that she found in the woods behind our house, so who knows? The alien lover might find a place in the New Order after all.

Not that we’re going to be conquered, mind you. Well, maybe you will, but that’s okay as long as my defenses hold up. We don’t need lots of heroic defenders of the planet. One will do, as long as it’s me so that I don’t have to share any screen time with you on The Daily Show explaining why I’m so friggin awesome.

And I am awesome, bro. What I’m not, though, is immune to special alien attacks that we’ve uncovered. Somehow they’ve used subspace ray thingies to disrupt our research and flatten our cakes. Dang, that stinks! As we complete projects, we have a chance to take defense against these underhanded attacks, not to mention getting better at knowing what the results of our research are, spinning that research with the media, and learning more in less time.

Naturally to break up all that lab time, any number of special events will occur. Birthdays, weddings, votes to determine who gets dibs on a special piece of defensive magic that will make alien knees quiver and bladders weaken. Lots of votes await, so don’t spend all your time with your head down in the test tubes. Learn to smooth talk your fellow researchers so that the cakes and treats flow your way. If you’re lucky, I’ll be off somewhere making time with your sister and not give you any competition.

That research treadmill will undoubtedly keep us busy, but at some point you know those aliens will poke their pointy heads over the horizon and start raining destruction down on us. Once that happens, the alien dupe—that traitor to his race, that fiend with a fondness for perfidy—will reveal his scummy self and take part in the alien attack, redirecting their attack efforts so as not to dump on the weaklings overmuch and let those with strong defense off easy. What’s more, the alien handmaiden will undoubtedly turn his precious projects, the ones he just couldn’t wait to use on ET, against his fellow humans, exploiting the weak points that he learned about over long weekends and summer cookouts with the campus president. I knew I should have kept quiet about my lace collection.

No matter, the alien stooge will do his worst to throw humanity onto the garbage pile of history, and we’ll endeavor to cram a sock down his neck and make him cough argyle. Research might not be fun, but it’s the only tool we have, so we’ll have to keep plugging away and hope that the projects we develop hold the line against alien scum.

Oh, man, the propaganda’s gotten to me now, too…

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