Team Up to Beat AI in the 2001: A Space Odyssey Board Game

By Keith Law | September 3, 2025 | 2:00pm

Tabletop Reviews 2001: A Space Odyssey

Team Up to Beat AI in the 2001: A Space Odyssey Board Game

A one-versus-many game where normal humans are fighting an out-of-control artificial intelligence that will stop at nothing, including murder, to keep itself plugged in? If ever there was a game for our present moment it’s this one… even though it’s based on a movie from 57 years ago.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a constant presence on lists of the greatest movies ever made, coming in as the #1 movie in Sight & Sound’s directors’ poll in 2022 (although it didn’t even get a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture, which might be the worst miss among the many bad misses in that award’s history). Designer Phil-Walker Harding has now taken the plot of the central third of the film and created a semi-cooperative board game where one player plays as HAL, the rogue AI that refuses to open the pod bay doors, and two to four other players play as the various astronauts, who try to keep HAL from shutting down the ship while they coordinate to deliver the codes to turn the computer off. It’s a very good interpolation of the film’s best-remembered part—honestly, do you know anyone who talks about the last part when they talk about this movie? You don’t, I promise you—that gets some of the key points in the film right by turning them into core facets of the mechanics.

In 2001, the players are working together, but their communication is always limited and sometimes even prohibited. The players’ shared deck has a number of action cards, including ones to repair the ship’s four main systems, ones to open doors (including those of the pod bay), and ones to retrieve cards from the shared discard pile, but the most important cards are the 12 numbered 1 through 12 that players must use to turn HAL off. One player has to get a sequence of three of those cards, any three as long as they’re consecutive, and deliver them to the Core space on the board to knock HAL down a peg; knock him down three and the players win. You can give a card to another player if you’re on the same space, but just one, and you can never show other players the cards you have.

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HAL wins by shutting off the life support system, which requires that that player play seven life support cards, or shutting off the ship’s other three systems, which requires playing four matching cards to each of those spaces. HAL starts with a hand size of six cards, dropping one for each level the players knock HAL down, with three of those hand cards always visible to players. HAL’s cards beyond the damage cards include closing doors (including… you get it), forcing a specific player to choose a card to discard, asking a single player if they have a specific card and then making them discard it, and the annoying Lipread card. When that card is in HAL’s hand and visible to the astronauts, the players can not communicate at all until someone plays a Cancel card.

2001: A Space Odyssey board game

The board is very simple—it’s a ring with one offshoot for the pod bay—and players’ actions are usually restricted to where they are on the board. They can move up to two spaces per turn when the game starts, and then can take as many actions as they’re able to, given their location and the cards in their hands. Then they draw one or two cards, with a few exceptions, ending their turn. HAL begins the game by taking two to four turns to cause some trouble, and then will take another turn after each astronaut’s turn. Turns are mostly short, so the downtime is very limited for the astronauts and almost nonexistent for HAL.

The players’ job seems harder than HAL’s, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s not balanced—it’s more that the astronauts’ path to winning is more difficult conceptually. They have to figure out how to get a sequence of three numbered cards into one player’s hand, and get that player to the Core, without HAL figuring out what cards they have. If HAL knows this and has a Target card, they can play it and force the player to discard the card HAL names—so if they have 4-5-6, HAL could force them to discard the 5. It’s not trashed, but an astronaut has to play a Recover card to get it back, and that may not be the same as the player who has the other two cards in the sequence.

As the game progresses, the constraints on both sides tighten. HAL’s hand limit drops to five and then four as the astronauts deliver three-card sequences to the core. The three systems beyond life support each come with a penalty for the astronauts when HAL shuts them off: the hand limit drops to four, player movement drops to just one space (this is brutal), and the draw-two spaces on the board become draw-one spaces. My sense is that those shift the game more towards HAL’s side.

The players do play as any of five characters from the film, with Dave the only required one (so the HAL player can say the line). Each has some unique player abilities, like a larger hand limit or the ability to move through closed doors, and four of the five astronauts have specialized repair skills that let them remove more damage cards from a specific system.

Walker-Harding has nailed the theme here, even though he’s written that he took some of the mechanics from an earlier game that was team versus team rather than one versus many. The claustrophobic sense of the closing doors and limited options, the need to be silent because HAL has figured out how to read lips, it’s all very streamlined and focused, so that the game captures the movie like very few film-to-tabletop adaptations have. The gameplay itself is solid, mostly familiar to anyone who’s played semi-cooperative or one-versus-many games, and other than some minor nitpicks—adding a #13 card to the astronauts’ deck would, for reasons I won’t go into here because it’s boring, make the game a little more balanced—and I would bet this is one where you can get much better by playing with the same people a few times. There’s enough to the bluffing and communication aspect of the astronauts’ side, with some ambiguity in the rules about what exactly they can or can’t say, that it probably rewards experience and allows new players to handle HAL more easily than they handle the astronauts. I’m deeply skeptical if not outright hostile to the current obsession with AI, not least because it is going to speed up climate change, drive water scarcity, and hike our power bills. It was refreshing to get to take my shots at AI on the tabletop, at least.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.