In the beginning…
Doom, following on the heels of Wolfenstein 3d, was one of the first major FPS hits. I’m sure I’m not the only one here with fond memories of the things that made it great: the fast-moving and incredibly slick (at the time) graphics, the satisfying blast of the shotgun, the thrill of fighting legions and legions of demons, and the awesome use of directional sound to make it feel like you were truly surrounded by foes.
After the release of Doom 2 there was a lull of many years with only various rehashes, additional levels, and user modifications to keep the Doom line fresh. Recently, however, that lull has come to an end with the release of Doom 3 and its upcoming expansion pack. Not coincidentally, Fantasy Flight Games also recently released Doom: The Boardgame offering a space marine vs demonic invaders fix for those of us who indulge in non-electronic gaming. This review will examine this new board game, as well as comment on the experience of several sessions of actual play.
Bring it On
I’m a fan of tactical board games that pit a handful of players against a larger force of human-controlled bad guys. It lets me satisfy the hack-n-slash DM inside as the bad guy force, or enjoy co-operative gaming against intelligent opposition as the good guys. In the past, I’ve greatly enjoyed Heroquest, Siege on the Citadel, and Space Hulk. So, when I heard that the new Doom game was going to feature a similar setup, I immediately added it to my to-buy list.
Overview
Doom pits 1-3 marines against a swarm of 8 distinct demonic invaders. The marines explore an initially unrevealed map, fight monsters, grab weapons and equipment essential to their survival, and ultimately must co-operatively overcome the threats presented to them by the Invader player. The games comes with 5 pre-made scenarios that take each take several hours to complete. These scenarios can be played individually, or linked together as a continuous campaign over which the marines collect experience for their kills that can be traded in for more equipment or abilities.
Components
Doom comes in an attractive, square cardboard box featuring a roaring demon on the cover. Inside there are a variety of game cards, reference cards, game board tiles, dice, and a large number of plastic figures to represent the marines and invaders.
Figures
Starting with the most obvious component: the figures. There are a lot of them, and they range greatly in size from the small spider-like Trites to the huge, 2-part Cyber Demon that dwarfs the marines in an appropriately menacing fashion. The first thing that I noticed, however, was the color: the invaders come evenly divided among three bright, primary colors: red, blue, and green. Such bright, garish colors seem strange and dissonant for the figures they depict, and serve to make the invaders much harder to take seriously. Initially I felt that maybe I was just being picky, but the very first player comment I received when playing was “I won’t be scared by those!” as I took the demons out of the box. I’ve since applied some spraypaint to all of the figures and given the zombies a full wargame-style paint job, but given that the pallet of Doom 3 can be re-created almost entirely with gray, brown, and flesh pink the choice of plastic seems odd.
Color aside, the figures are largely well made and clearly indicate what demon they indicate. The larger demons, especially, have a significant bulk to them that makes the players sit up and pay attention when they come into play. The only real confusion that has come up in play is between the imp and the archvile. This is not so much a flaw with the game as the result of both demons being tall humanoids of similar build.
Cardboard Components
The cardboard floor tiles are the star of the components. They are made of thick, sturdy cardboard and feature clean artwork that both provides a clear grid and reproduces Doom’s industrial/starbase look. Furthermore, each piece links with other pieces with a jigsaw-puzzle like connection at each exit. While this makes the board more difficult to assemble than modular games where tiles are simply placed touching each other, it makes the assembled board more sturdy. This paid off several times in play when we had to slide the board in one direction or the other to make room for more tiles.
To decorate the board a wide variety of obstacles, equipment, and doors are provided. These are made of the same high-quality cardboard as the floor tiles and are similarly illustrated. The doors also come with plastic stands to let you place them upright. These components, combined with the floor tiles, impressed me very favorably.
Each player also receives a reference card listing the capabilities of the weapons and monsters, and each marine receives a card to store armor, ammunition, and health. The marine equipment cards, much like the floor tiles, are made of thick sturdy cardboard and are very handsome. The reference cards, being much larger and more likely to be handled in-play, are made of thinner cardboard.
When playing the game, the size of the images on the reference card proved to be an issue several times. Players had some difficulty identifying weapons and monsters from the small pictures. This was especially problematic in the case of the monsters, who are displayed in low-contrast, monochromatic blue. This isn’t likely to be an issue after the players have a game or two under their belt, though. It would be also nice if the various dice modifier (damage, range, knockback, blowthrough, etc) icons were defined on the reference sheet, since the players otherwise have to refer back to the rulebook to know what they mean.
Rules, Rules, Rules!
The rulebook and scenario guide are printed in full color on good quality paper, stapled together into two separate booklets. The rules features larger pictures of all of the invaders and the guns, as well as several diagrams that proved useful in answering many questions about how different movement and weapon effects were resolved. The scenario guide features a fully assembled board showing where each floor tile and piece of equipment should go on one page, with descriptions to be read aloud and gameplay effects of each room on the opposite page. Overall, the two booklets are quite good; there were a few misunderstandings and ambiguities, but no more than you might expect when learning any other game.
Cards and Box
The game also comes with a large stack of invader cards and a smaller stack of marine ability cards. These cards are of a good size, in full color, and easily distinguishable from each other.
One other minor components issue: while handsome and pleasantly textured, I have found the box that Doom came in reasonably flimsy. Shortly after the initial opening of the game, one of the corners of the bottom half of the box had given out and required taping to fix. Four games worth of taking out components and putting them back later, a second corner has broken and a third shows signs of giving. Nothing clear packing tape can’t handle, but surprising given the high quality of the other cardboard components of the game.
Gameplay
Setup and Overview
Doom’s gameplay is fairly straightforward. Every turn, the marine players can run eight squares, move four squares and fire, fire twice, or move four squares and take one of several actions such as an opportunity-fire “Guard” action. On the invader’s turn he draws a number of cards dependant on the number of marines in play, may play one spawn card to bring more monsters in play out of the marines’ line-of-sight, then moves and attacks with each monster. About two-thirds of the Invader’s cards are effect cards, instead of spawn cards, that may be played at various points of either side’s turn with a wide variety of effects that assist invaders or harm marines.
During setup, each marine draws two or three ability cards to grant them powerful special abilities such as additional or better attacks, additional movement, additional health or armor, or special abilities such as the ability to run through monsters. These serve to give the marines an edge that they will desperately need, and also provide some distinction and possibly role-division between the marines if there are multiple marine players. Although certain abilities were more popular than others, only one card stuck out as especially ineffectual: Survival Ops. Survival Ops grants a player 3 additional starting health. Since another card with an endurance-boosting effect, Tough, provides much more protection against the majority of the damage in the game, Survival Ops seemed particularly like a poor draw.
Exploration
As the marines explore each new room, the Invader player places floor tiles, obstacles, equipment, and monsters, and then reads the text from the scenario booklet. Some rooms provide opportunities, such as a chance to rescue a dying scientist or to risk an ambush to grab a keycard. Others offer environmental hazards such as restricted line-of-sight.
Time, generally speaking, is against the marines. The marines begin with limited equipment and the items that can be found on the map never replenish themselves. The monsters, on the other hand, will continuously spawn and when the Invader goes through his deck he scores a point (“frag”) towards victory and reshuffles to draw anew. This forces the marine players to decide if it is worth the time to gain equipment or fight opponents when hurrying onward is possible. After playing any given scenario once, the marines may use their foreknowledge of the hidden map to bypass entire rooms when playing through it a second time. In general, however, any rooms that may be bypassed feature valuable equipment so this isn’t a no-brainer decision.
Combat
Attacks are resolved by rolling a variety of colored dice depending on the attacking weapon or monster. Each dice features bullet holes indicating damage, and a number indicating range. If the range equals or exceeds the number of squares to the target, the attack hits. The total damage is then divided by the armor of the target, rounding down, and the result applied as wounds. Some dice also feature bullets, indicating ammo loss, and “Miss” symbols that indicate an attack that always misses and a chance of weapon breakage in the campaign game. Roughly speaking, there is a one-in-three chance of using up ammunition with each attack for most weapons. This randomness in ammo consumption was a source of complaints from several players in testing, although it also serves to keep the number of tokens that need to be shuffled down and add suspense as to exactly how much ammunition a player has left.
One complaint I have about the dice is that they serve to obfuscate the effect of the weapons and attacks. If one examines the dice, it can be observed that red and blue dice mostly deal damage while yellow and green dice tend to inflict range. However, when a new player sees that the rifle fires one yellow, one green, and one blue die they aren’t really going to have any clue what the weapon actually does. One small perk that does come from this combined method of die rolling, however, is that because the high-damage die faces have lower range values weapons will tend to do more damage at short range than long without any additional computations.
Play Comments
I have played four games of Doom with two different groups of players. Three of the games were with two marines, and the fourth with three. The marines lost all four games, although in two of the games they were within a room of winning. “A room of winning” is a bit deceptive, however, since in proper video game style the last room has the largest monsters as a level boss.
While I had fun controlling the Invaders, the player responses were largely negative. Almost all of the players felt that the marine side was too difficult, ammunition was far too scarce, and that the random factor of the Invader cards and ammo consumption dice were too strong.
The ammunition problem was especially apparent. In all games, ammunition became scarce very quickly. This was especially problematic in the 3-player game, since the number of invaders increases with the number of marines but the amount of ammunition provided in the scenarios doesn’t. In the two player games, one marine usually manned the chainsaw while the other took on a shooting role and generally managed to scrape by barely. In the three player game, one marine had the chainsaw while the other two alternated between guns and fists as they found and used ammunition. The players who had to resort to punching became extremely frustrated and resigned.
The better ammunition- explosives and cells- is especially scarce. Many times the players would find explosives, and then roll ammunition consumption on their first grenade throw. In one mission there was a BFG, but only one unit of cells unless the players burned more precious time to return to a vault and retrieve a second cell. Thanks to the “Dud” Invader card, which forces a marine to discard an ammunition token, the marine who found the BFG never got to fire it even once. (since the BFG rolls two ammunition consumption dice, it would likely have run out after one or two shots regardless)
In another scenario, the two marines were hiding behind a vent and lobbing grenades out onto slow-moving gun-wielding demons in a room. Well aware of the scarcity of ammo, one marine was using the “Tactician” special ability to make each thrown an aimed shots. Since any dice of an aimed shot may be rerolled, this allowed for the ammunition consumption results to be re-rolled. However, another common Invader card, “Dodge”, cancels aiming effects and again the marines found themselves out of their lone explosive ammunition after a single toss. Even without the force of the Invader cards, however, ammunition and especially the better ammunition was extremely rare.
The net result of these playtesting experiences is that it doesn’t seem likely that Doom will get played much among either of my gaming groups. By the third and fourth games, we were handicapping the Invader player a card draw per turn without much more luck for the marines. While I have downloaded and proposed using the difficulty modifying rules from Fantasy Flight Game’s website and also implemented a “weapons come with an ammunition clip of their type” rule that was suggested on another website, I have yet to successfully persuade either group to give Doom another run.
Conclusion
Odd choice in plastic color aside, Doom is an attractive game with very nice components. However, the high difficulty in the scenarios provided, scarce and unpredictable ammunition, and a constant flow of harmful events from the Invader player means that the marine players will have to fight very hard to win. Unless the marine players enjoy a long bitter battle with extremely scarce resources, many demoralizing twists of fate, and a very high chance of losing they are unlikely to enjoy the game.
It’s possible that once the marine players learn the game and the scenarios that they can win with some degree of consistency. It is also possible that with some simple modifications to increase ammunition and decrease the threat posed by the Invaders the game would be much improved. However, out of the box the game proved too difficult and depressing for either of my gaming groups.
Overall, I would rate Doom a 4 of 5 for style because of the largely high-quality components. If you’re willing to put a little time into coloring the miniatures, this would easily be a 5.
For content, I rate Doom 3 of 5. With a more persistent or last-stand friendly group, I could see how this could be a lot of fun out of the box. With some rules tweaks, I also imagine that the game could be made much more enjoyable for a wider group of players. As it stands unmodified, however, it seems poorly balanced in favor of the Invaders and all five of the players that I tested the game with found it more frustrating than fun.
