They Fly! (1954)

The ultimate horror thriller comes to life! Can astronaut Rick Strongbow and his international colleagues stave off a horde of biologically engineered nazi moon-scorpions?

Design

We needed our own absurd swarm animal movie. You’ve had Birdemic and Sharknado. Now, you’re introduced to biologically engineered nazi moon-scorpions with jetpacks. They Fly is a play on all these movies and old pulp sci-fi that we sort of explored with Killtron in the previous game. This is just the next step in their evolution!

Multi-figure monsters have already been represented mechanically with ReGoo, Werewolves, and Deadline. In fact, Bride of Spooktacular already has one in the form of the Dead Presidents. We wanted to make They Fly feel different simply because swarm monsters in these movies aren’t about there being multiple creatures for you to deal with. Instead, the creatures as a collective entity are a “single” monster. It’s not about the threat of individual scorpions, it’s about the entire swarm!

In a sort of callback to Grimhive, They Fly uses tokens to represent the members of its swarm, while the big swarm pack itself is the monster figure. Manipulating and controlling the swarm and tokens as a collective is the real fantasy of the monster.

Ideation

A lot of cool concepts to be seen here! Many of them give that exact old-school sci-fi poster vibe that we wanted. However, many of them also display an individual scorpion as a massive threat. This isn’t exactly what the monster is all about. It’s the sheer number of these blasted things that gets you, not any single one.

The final poster ended up being the right mix of displaying the swarm while still giving you a close-up of one to show just how odd and silly these things are. Gotta love those jetpacks!

Strategy

They Fly is sort of an in-between of a multi-figure monster and a token monster. Its tokens effectively act as if they were other figures (with card effects that may be familiar to fans of ReGoo). However, what truly makes this monster interesting is that you can have your swarm bump into and manipulate the scorpions by spooking them, giving you points and crazy control over the positioning of any singular token. What’s more, you then swap places with ANY scorpion, letting you shift the swarm’s focus within your mass of scorpions. Any game with They Fly will quickly turn into a scorpion-riddled mess!

They Fly starts the game off at its full power, unlike many monsters that use tokens and multiple figures, giving it great range and potency. Some of its card effects instruct each scorpion to do some mean effect. They Claw is probably the meanest, letting you steal up to 6 points from multiple players or, worse, from a single player if you’ve set things up right!

Play If You Like:

• A continuous stream of points from spooking
• Having wide-ranged abilities that affect many rooms
• Managing a bunch of bits on the board

Avoid If You Dislike:

• Continuous swarm management
• Being VERY mean to other players at the table
• Awkward mobility that’s affected by previous scorpion placements

See it LIVE!

They Fly onto your screens!

Alternate Poster

The Mexican Saturday Morning Cartoon poster for They Fly comes from the artistic MabramS of Mouse: PI for Hire fame. I love the idea of some sort of old-school rubberhose cartoon series for this movie.

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