Pyramid Review
Natural Selection: A Thrilling Prequel to Sucking Vacuum!
Published by Alien Menace
Designed by Marc Davis
Eight 5½ by 8½-inch card sheets, one four page 5½ by 8½-inch rules leaflet, one rocket shaped turn counter, & one six-sided die; $5.95
Monkeys. Woohoo!
Monkey poop. Euuww . . . !
Both appear in the latest game from Alien Menace. Well, actually, neither appear in Natural Selection, the prequel to one of last year's most frantically fun games, Sucking Vacuum, which itself has been given a spiffy full-color upgrade for its recent second edition. Instead, Natural Selection is about chimps being trained to serve aboard the International Space Station. You know, the one that is going to hemorrhage oxygen like a very leaky thing in Sucking Vacuum. And sometimes yes, this does involve chimp poop, though not the bit about hemorrhaging oxygen . . . Anyway, chimps are cheap to train and easily replaced, so can be shot into space without risk to human life. They also do not ask quite so many awkward questions. So eight nations have put forward their best chimponauts who must complete a series of tasks in the fastest possible time within set time limits. The best overall team of chimps will then be sent into orbit.
Alien Menace put out games in a similar style to those from Cheapass Games, but they come better appointed. That includes everything necessary to play: dice, counters, boards, and tokens, plus the ziplock bags to store it all. (This is a feat that many other publishers . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 30, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.