Doom: The Board Game First Impressions
From Doom the Movie:
Sarge: Are you gonna shoot me?
John Grimm: Yeah, was thinking about it
Sarge: What you got left?
John Grimm: Half a clip. You?
Sarge: [points to BFG] I’ve got one round.
DOOM: The Board Game is strategy board game of tactical combat for 2-5 players based on Bethesda and id Software’s video game of the same name. Featuring two distinct player roles, the game brings the epic battle between elite marines and Hell’s most threatening monsters to the tabletop.
We played a 3-player game with 1 player playing the Monsters and 2 human players playing the excellently named Marines: Alpha and Delta… (The other 2 are Beta and Charlie if you’re wondering :))
After some board set up the game is ready to go. In this fairly small game we, the Marines, had to get to 3 checkpoints and activate them twice each. The Monsters had to kill us 6 times in total.
Turn order is random… Each Marine has a card in a deck and the Monsters have 1 card per creature type on the board. This deck is shuffled and one is revealed and they take their action, then the next is revealed etc…
Each creature type also has a card which shows it abilities, hit points etc and it’s tapped to show that it’s been activated this round.
Marines have a number of action points depending on the number of players.
Cards
You have a hand of cards and you use them in a deck-building way, adding more cards to your deck and you run over weapon pickups.
The cards give you various actions as well as movement points and the ability to attack.
Attacks are done via dice, how many dice you roll is on the card as is the range of the weapon.
You hit once per symbol and then the defender (Monster or Marine), turns over the top card of their deck and blocks damage equal to the number of shields on that card.
You play until either side has completed their goals.
Positives
It’s very streamlined and simple. No fuss with the line of sight or cover, Damage is just ‘X Symbols – X Shields’… it’s all very straightforward.
The minis are great 🙂 In fact, the components are all pretty good, very ‘Fantasy Flight’.
The variable turn order not only makes combat crazy and unpredictable (as it should be) but it makes the Monster player diversify. They get more turns for having more Monster TYPES so the smaller, weaker units are important to them too.
Monsters have this state taken from the newer computer games where if they’re nearly dead you can just walk into them to install them to heal some health and get a special ability. That is fun to do… Just walking through a group of weakened baddies.
There’s the B F G!!!! (I got to fire it a couple of times too!)
Negatives
I miss the ‘Roll to Hit AND Roll for Damage’ from Descent. I’m a huge fan of the roll to hit and roll for the damage being separate, or at least worked out separately from each other whilst keeping it random with a dice roll.
Currently, there aren’t any Stories or ways to progress a character. I would love to see Marines build a deck and have a way to take it from scenario to scenario… Similar to Pathfinder the Adventure Card Game.
It was quite expensive… You get a lot for your cash, it’s just a lot of cash.
Doom: The Board Game Summary
My favourite of these games (Descent, Imperial Assault etc) is due to liking the IP more and the more streamlined gameplay.
I’d play this more, as the Marines, not sure I want the pressure of controlling the Monsters 🙂
Jesta ThaRogue
