Review: Alien Pastoral: The Strain

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Chelsea Physic Garden as part of their Summer Lates series, in part because this Late featured a game from David Blandy (Eco Mofos!!, Gathering Storm, and many more) that I’d not come across before, the intriguingly named Alien Pastoral: The Strain. It was the perfect excuse to both touch grass and play games at the same time - how could I pass that up?

The Gardens

Despite being pretty thoroughly cooked in London’s worst drought (and heatwave) in half a century, the gardens themselves were very interesting! Being originally a working garden for the Worshipful Company of Alchemists, there was a good variety of medicinal plants from across the world, with excellent signage describing exactly what I was looking at (or, to be more precise, what I should have been looking at, rather than the rather sad shrubs I actually was looking at). It also included some lovely, if small, greenhouses including one for carnivorous plants - and another dedicated to ferns, which I’d not seen before and was quite beautiful, and mercifully cool! 

To one side of the garden was a grove of trees - a great example of urban design, as it was significantly cooler and more pleasant there under the boughs, despite the outside environment being identical. In the centre was a grassy lawn, where the game was set up. I can certainly imagine this to be a lovely spot to relax in on a slightly cooler day.

All in all, the gardens were lovely, and I’d really recommend them - and I’ll definitely be going back next spring to see it all blooming. The timing of the Late was perfect as well, starting just after rush hour, and finishing just as dusk was breaking. I think there were probably twenty or so of us wandering around, but you wouldn’t know it by looking, I felt as if I was in a private garden all to myself. 

Alien Pastoral

Alien Pastoral is hard to define; it’s effectively a prompt based improv game using both map drawing and Jenga towers to build a sense of belonging and tension, like some sort of mix of Dread and A Quiet Year. For our setup, we had four outdoor tables, each with a big sheet of paper covering the table that we could draw on, some markers, a d6, a Jenga tower, and the game itself, which was a stack of nicely finished and illustrated custom playing cards.

My game - you can just about see our state-of-the-art crab-robot escape vehicle!

In short, the game is about scientists meddling with forces they do not understand. You are plant biologists, working for the Authority down in a secret lab known only as the Silo to create a new plant strain that can solve one of several existential agricultural problems, like increased drought or cold resistance. Along the way, however, these plants show themselves to be much, much more than they first appeared…

Gameplay

You play as one of several characters, from the scientists to the engineers to the chefs and janitors, each with their own secrets they are trying to hide. To start the game, you collectively draw out the Silo, where it is (we put it deep underwater), what each part looks like, what the plant itself looks like, and various other attributes. In the end, we were growing cold resistant, psychoactive ferns in a verdant, if clearly underfunded and mouldy, lab several kilometres beneath the ocean, surviving on a diet of spuds and reruns of Shark Tales. What could go wrong?

To play the game, you draw one of a series of thirteen thought-provoking prompts, like:

“You look at your fingers. They’ve become strangely flexible, like rubber, and slightly sticky. What do you do? Who do you tell?”

You then improv that out around the table, and then roll a d6. If that d6 rolls a 4 or less, then this revelation is destabilising - and you pull a block from the Jenga tower. If it rolls a 5+, then it becomes a piece of research. If you knock the tower over, you become Changed - the plants take over, changing your motivations towards making sure everyone else remains in the Silo and become Changed too.

There are three days, each with their own series of prompts that gradually increase in plant-based weirdness, existential dread, and chaos. To win, you need to collect three matching pieces of research (each day is represented by a suit, and the thirteen cards correspond to the thirteen cards in that suit, like a standard playing card deck) across all three days (so for example, collecting 3♦️ on day 1, 3♣️ on day 2, and finally 3♠️ on day 3). Alternatively, to lose the game, you need to draw the king of spades, something you can only do on day 3 - so win or lose, you still get to experience the majority of all three phases of the game.

Or so I assume, anyway. We were unlucky enough to immediately pull that card on starting day 3, and (despite my arguing that we should just cheat and ignore it), we played the hand we were dealt (which was probably in the spirit of things anyway).

My Thoughts

All in all, it was an enjoyable experience. The core concept was well explained, and we all threw ourselves into our characters very quickly and smoothly. We even started getting little factions going, which was a lot of fun - and while we technically did lose, we also exposed the entire world to the plants, so in the grand scheme of things, the whole planet lost, which sounds like a draw to me. 

It wasn’t perfectly suited to the venue - we had our tower blow over in the wind before anyone could knock it over themselves, but that was a relatively minor problem. I especially enjoyed that each prompt wasn’t just about what you thought or did, it generally also brought in other players around the table, which, especially for a table of strangers, was a nice way of sharing the spotlight.

My only gripe with it basically boils down to me wanting it to be something it wasn’t. I wanted more meat to it; I wanted the classes to feel like they were mechanically different - perhaps with simple Pandemic style abilities, I wanted the Changed characters to have meaningful weight behind their motivations and actions - as the game stands, they want the other players to also become Changed, but there’s no meaningful way they can make that happen - with only a couple of exceptions, the only way someone can become Changed is by knocking over the Jenga tower - perhaps the implication is that the Changed should be egging the person to take more risks during that minigame?

Similarly, I feel like the map could have been better utilised; perhaps prompts could have altered the map, asking us to draw new things, new obstacles, new resources, or removing things; entrances, etc. Ostensibly, different prompts were focused on different parts of the Silo, but they never did by anything more than name; one notable example was on Day 2, where an event shuts the airlocks between the different rooms, preventing movement - but there were no consequences for the following prompts, and indeed it would have been hard to follow the fiction when other prompts then have characters meet up despite declaring they were separated a few prompts earlier.

When I step back, however, the game I’ve just suggested is much more complicated and less friendly to a wide audience that isn’t necessarily as deep into ttrpgs as I am than the game as presented - and so the majority of my criticisms vanish in a puff of context. I do still feel as if some - or most - of the cards had a lot of blank space with very brief prompts - I would have loved to see a bit more detail in there, but it wasn’t necessary. The secrets were my only let down - they felt very arbitrary, and weren’t very impactful or helpful in visualising characters, I would have preferred to have six more character options (for replayability or for larger groups) or more ways to describe and explore the Silo instead.

It’s a pity that Alien Pastoral is the sort of game I’m probably unlikely to pick up for my home games, as I run almost entirely online these days. The Jenga tower I can probably work around (there’s some great discussion on the Wretched and Alone itch forums about online alternatives), but the game book being a series of cards means that I either need to scan them in individually to show my players, or recreate them individually, both of which seem painstaking processes. I believe that at some point the game was also offered as a booklet but that seems to have vanished - I’ve reached out to David and will update this article accordingly!

 In conclusion, I think that Alien Pastoral is a really interesting sort of game - it’s not the sort of thing I think I’d play with the same group twice, nor do I think I’d push to play it with a very mechanically-forward group, but it is the sort of game I’d use to introduce people to the idea of ttrpgs and narrative gaming, especially through an environmental lens. It’s slick, it’s got a fantastic and really evocative concept, it’s well presented, I had a very good time with it, and I'd certainly recommend it.