Paranoia
- Board's Eye View
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
To give it its full title, Paranoia: The Uncooperative Board Game is a board game from Modiphius based on the tongue-in-cheek Paranoia role-playing game (RPG) designed by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber and Eric Goldberg that was originally published in 1984 by West End Games and was later licensed by Mongoose Publishing.
In this board game version, the 2-6 players are 'troubleshooters' exploring and moving around the dystopian Alpha Complex city. The actions you take are determined by the action cards you play, but the action cards also represent your troubleshooter's health, so you lose a card every time you take damage. If you have to take damage and have no action cards left to discard, your troubleshooter dies. Death, however, isn't final: players each have a supply of clones to replace them; it's only when a troubleshooter dies without having any more clones left that they are actually eliminated and the game ends.
The premise for Alpha Complex is that it is controlled by a 'friendly' computer. The computer sets some tasks on which players will probably need to cooperate but it is only the player(s) that contributed the most to completing the task that will gain the reward of advancing along the computer's 'Clearance Level' spectrum.
You want to advance across the spectrum because it's ultimately the path towards victory and it will give you unfettered access to more rooms and equipment in Alpha Complex. It's considered treasonous to be in a location for which you don't have clearance. You'll find you need to risk it but you'll be vulnerable there to attacks from robotic guards and from being ratted out by other players. In addition, you can attempt a series of secret missions, success on which advance a marker back from the ultraviolet end of the spectrum; and the game is won by the player whose markers meet.
Paranoia delivers a heady mix of excitement and chaos. In our plays so far at Board's Eye View, players have only felt incentivised to attack fellow troubleshooters when there's a prospect of ransacking their prone body for a valuable equipment card. Still, you're never at any point under the illusion that it's a cooperative game: you can sabotage pathways and equipment to hamper a rival's progress, and players won't hesitate to denounce each other as traitors as soon as they stray beyond their clearance level. Is it Paranoia if people really are all out to get you?
