The number of bits included with DOOM is amazing: the box contains 12 sprues of cardboard punch-out maps and tokens, a large number of figures (including three "CyberDemon" figures which are assembled out of two parts), plastic stands for mounting doors on, two decks of cards, six dice, four reference cards, and the rulebook and scenario guide. Annoyingly, it provides absolutely no way of storing most of these; many of the items are provided in bags which can only be opened via being torn, and the box is no longer big enough to hold the game once it is unpacked (a major grumble with many board games, but not inevitable, as shown by games such as Risk 2200). At least, being a lidded box, it can be overfilled without disaster.
The figures are quite well-moulded, although with odd bits of flash, and are made of soft plastic. However, their colouring is a bit unusual: there are three marine figures, one of each of the primary colours, and the enemies (called "invaders") are also each colored in one of the three primary colours. The idea here is that if a given colour of marine isn't being played, monsters of the same colour become unavailable, thus scaling the game. A good idea, but there's a big tradeoff: it's not possible to pick out the marines at a glance, and several of the invaders - most obviously the zombies - have figures that resemble the marines.
The dice provide a mechanic similar to the Dungeons and Dragons game; they are customised, colour coded, d6s. When a Marine fires a weapon or an Invader attacks, the strength of its attack is defined as a set of dice that should be rolled for it. Each dice face show either a number or an X, and may also show one or more bullet-holes and/or a picture of a bullet. To see if an attack hit, you roll the dice, add up the printed numbers, and the result is the maximum range at which you hit. If your target was further away than that, or if any dice rolled an X, you missed. If you did manage to hit, the number of bullet-holes on the dice are added together to determine how many points of damage you did, and this is then divided by the target's armor to determine how many hit points they lose. The bullet icons are used for ammo, which we'll get to later.
This is an extension of the D&D board game mechanic and is very elegant - it enables the to-hit and damage of each shot to be resolved in a single roll, and neatly creates effects such as maximum ranges, range bands of weapon effectiveness, and so on. The reference card lists every type of weapon and every invader together with the dice set rolled when they attack (invaders can't change weapon, so each invader has a single fixed dice set). The problem is that these dice sets are the only information you get on each weapon, meaning that you've got to work out for yourself the properties of the weapons you're using. In D&D's version of the system the only thing you got from the dice was damage, and more was always better, so this wasn't a problem. But when range is involved - something you've got to make decisions about and plan tactics for - suddenly you start needing to know.
There's an invader 7 squares away - is it within range of my pistol shot? What's the maximum range of a pistol? Uhh, dunno. Gotta look for the maximum faces on the dice and add them up (by the way, it's 7 squares, so yes). Ok, let's try that 7 square shot. Dang it, missed! Yes - because what your quick glance didn't tell you was that you had only a 6% chance to hit, and no chance of doing any damage unless you were getting a damage bonus from somewhere. More complex questions are naturally harder to answer: there's a demon 1 square away and I have a shotgun, if I move a square back before I shoot him, what effect does it have on my chance to hit? Unless you actually draw out the dice curves, you'll have no way of finding out that it more than halves your chance to hit.
The board for the game is assembled from cardboard sections representing rooms and corridors, thus granting greater flexibility over games which use large generic tiles with fixed room layouts on them. The board sections are made of hard cardboard, and are provided in a range of different sizes, and include slot-in tabs to join them together to create a map. The artwork on the tiles is good, although there's only so much you can do on tiles designed to create a generic map of a space station.
As in many of these games, up to three players take control of a Marine each while the fourth player controls all of the invaders. It's also the Invader player's job to set out new board areas as the marines move into them. As in D&D, the game includes a book with a number of scenarios, each of which provides an overall map which is revealed to the marines as they move around. And the Doom scenarios feature a real blast from the past: boxed text sections to read out to players when areas are revealed. Board areas can include walls, other hazards such as acid splashes, weapon and ammo tokens, and preplaced invaders. Most scenarios include additional twists beyond the standard rules, such as doors with keycards, secret areas revealed when particular events occur, teleporters, and similar.
The game is started by the Invader player setting up the board for the first room while the Marine players collect their starting tokens for ammo, health, and weapons. The number of health and ammo tokens each Marine recieves is determined by the number of Marines in the game, and all marines start with a pistol and their fists. Each Marine player also recieves two or three special ability cards; each one grants a unique ability that persists throughout the entire game. These ability cards are not minor tweaks or things that will come up only occasionally: they are significant and occasionally spectacular changes to the rules, such as the ability to heal other marines, extra movement speed or extra freedom in choosing actions, or damage or range bonuses applied to all attacks of particular types. Most of them are quite well balanced against each other, but there are a few exceptions.
The marines begin play; in each round, the marine players act in a fixed order, and finally the invader player takes a turn. In their turn, a marine may either sprint (move 8 squares), unload (fire twice), advance (more 4 squares and fire once), or ready (move or fire and recieve an order token - more on those later). The player must decide which to do before taking any action. Movement is easily done square by square, and unusually diagonal moves are permitted at no penalty. Whenever a new area is revealed, the marine's turn pauses to allow the invader player to set out the new board area; once the area is set up, the marine player's turn resumes. Weapons, ammo, armor, health and other tokens placed on the board are picked up by marines touching them. Firing is dealt with via the dice system as described above; the marine player selects a weapon, targets a square (the marine is not obliged to fire directly at an invader, and it may be helpful not to, since some weapons have area effect), rolls the dice, checks the range to see if they hit, and if they did so, the appropriate damage is applied to any affected invaders. Invaders have both health and armor, just like marines, so their wounds are tracked by placing tokens underneath their pieces on the board.
There are a few rather odd design aspects that come to light when this is actually played out. The first oddity is that, because the marines play in fixed turn order, the different marines have different properties. For example, if the first marine in the turn order opens a door, the invader player will have to set the area beyond out immediately, and all three marine players can then enter the area and attack any revealed invaders before they've even had a chance to move. On the other hand, if the last marine in the turn order does this, the next turn will be the invader player and the revealed invaders will be able to attack the marines. D&D randomized the turn order every time a new board area appeared, presumably to avoid this very situation, but there's no equivalent here.
The second oddity is the business about the marines having to choose their action before they do anything. The typical problem comes when a player's path is blocked by an invader, and what they'd ideally like to do is to shoot it once, then move on if it died or shoot it again if it didn't - but they can't do that, because they have to choose to advance (move and fire) or unload (fire twice) before they can roll that first attack. Ok, it's a tactical choice, but to make it, they need to know "How likely am I to kill that invader with my weapon in one hit?"... and, as mentioned above, that comes down to another round of staring at the dice faces and jotting down numbers until the other players start throwing blunt objects at you.
There are a number of such special properties that a weapon can have, represented by sets of icons below the weapon's dice set on the reference card. Helpfully, there's a full list of these on the back page of the rulebook, but most of them are relatively obvious after only a few goes, and the icons are well selected.
Marine weapons can also have ammunition - represented by tokens collected from the board. Remember that I mentioned some of the dice faces also show pictures of bullets? If a marine rolls any of them as part of their attack, they must discard an ammo token from their supply, and if they've run out, they can't fire the weapon anymore. Every ranged weapon in the game uses ammo - even the starting pistol (and yes, that's accurate to the videogame - the unlimited ammo starting gun didn't appear until Quake). The consequences of this are quite harsh: typically any marine weapon's dice set will include at least one dice which has a bullet picture on two of its faces, giving a roughly 1 in 3 chance of an ammo token being consumed with every shot. Since there aren't that many ammo tokens around, and since getting them depends on moving on through the map (and thus revealing more and more monsters), you need to make them count.
The order token system seems to have some origins in the overwatch system in Space Hulk. A marine that chooses a ready action can be given an order token at the end of a turn, of which there are three kinds: Dodge, Aim, and Guard. Dodge and Aim both have the same effect of allowing the marine to reroll the dice in an attack, either the next attack against the marine (Dodge) or the next attack made by the marine (Aim). Guard allows the marine to fire, once, out of turn - commonly when an invader is moved into their range or similar. Unlike Space Hulk's overwatch, marines can shoot only once rather than multiple times, but they can freely choose when to fire rather than doing so only when predefined events occur. This enables (for instance) a marine with a splash weapon to use it to attack invaders out of the marine's line of sight during another player's turn.
The Invader player plays in a similar way to the marines, except that they'll have more pieces to move, Invaders can only ever do Advance actions, and their movement rates vary (and are shown on the refence cards). Invaders also have armor and health, which makes tracking wounds to Invaders slightly more complex than it could be. A small niggle is that the reference card shows the different type of invaders as 'fuzzy' distorted camera images, which makes it rather hard to read. Unlike the marine players, the Invader player has a hand of cards, with new cards drawn every turn. There are two types of card: spawn cards (which add new invaders to the board), and event cards which have a range of different effects. Most of these are relatively minor effects, but the Invader player has access to lots of them throughout a game.
Invaders likewise don't have a choice of weapon; the weapon dice and special properties for an Invader's attack are shown in the invader's entry on the reference card. Marines killed by the invaders get to "respawn" on their next turn, but the Invader player scores a point for each marine killed. If the Invader player's card deck runs out, they also gain a point, thus creating a time limit for the marines. 6 points will win the game for the Invader; the marines must finish the scenario objective, which varies with each scenario (but usually involves reaching a certain place on the map) to win.
The game plays well, and although there is a little bit of slowdown caused by the division of damage by armor and the need to count ranges, this fairly quickly disappears - although I did find players were reluctant to use weapons at long range because they were unsure about their chance to hit. At first blush, the game seems like a blast, and the players will be happily dashing around shotgunning and machinegunning invaders...
.. until the marines die. Usually, quite horribly.
Because this game truly manages to live up to its name - possibly too well. The game is incredibly difficult for the marine players. On our first game, with experienced gamers playing both the invaders and the marines, the marines managed to make it down one corridor and into the second room of the first introductary scenario. We put this down to unfamiliarity, and tried a different scenario, which we got 3 rooms into. We then decided to relax the rules very slightly, allowing the marines to choose their starting ability cards rather than having them selected randomly, and doubling all collected ammo, and played the first scenario again. This time, we made it to the corridor beyond the second room, and were deciding which way to go, before being overwhelmed.
A number of factors conspire together to make the game hard for the marines. First, the spawn cards. The Invader player gets to play one of these each turn to add new invaders to the map in any area which is outside the marines' line of sight (which isn't very difficult given that most areas are wide rooms connected by narrow corridors; it's remarkable what turns out to have been hiding in the corner!) This means that, over time, the number of monsters that can appear in a particular area is unlimited; by contrast, the marines can run out of ammunition, and certainly will do unless they keep moving on through the map. Trying to "clear out" areas of monsters, as in the games, is impossible - the moment a marine turns their back (well, ok, the game doesn't actually have facing, but the moment they move more than a few squares down a corridor) the invader player can start spawning there.
The design also means that adding multiple marines actually makes the game harder: more monsters are added to increase the challenge for multiple players, but weapons and ammo aren't added, so in many cases there won't be enough around. This is compounded by the invader player's scoring system where they get a point per kill, no matter which marine player they killed. So if (as in the introduction scenario) the three marine players enter the first room to find a machinegun, shotgun and chainsaw, the invader player can just have the monsters wail on the guy with the chainsaw, killing him multiple times until they have the necessary points.
Actually, that might not be the best bet, though; the ammo system ensures that the fist and chainsaw are actually the most effective weapons in the game, to be used whenever they have a chance of inflicting damage. After all, using a gun would carry the risk of losing an ammo token that then couldn't be used on a fight where the fist or chainsaw wouldn't have worked. Moreover, according to the rules a marine that dies with no ammo respawns with no ammo; even death can't set you free. Nothing will get you ammo other than finding it in new map areas; and the invader player will be really grateful for you to charge off into a new map area with nothing more than your fist to protect you from the attendant monsters (last time that happened in our game the invader player got 3 points out of it).
The problem is compounded by the continuous hammering that the marines are liable to take from the invader player's cards. These give abilities such as activating invaders out of turn, declaring that weapon tokens on the board are 'traps' (which allows invaders to move, but - thankfully - doesn't destroy the weapon token), healing invaders, cancelling attacks, and a devastating card which destroys an ammo token.
The worrying thing is that none of this seems to have been anticipated by the game's designer. They freely throw huge encounters in at the end of each scenario, seemingly without too much of a concern for how awkward they're going to be. On one map, for instance, the scenario features a BFG (the most powerful weapon in the game), although the players must complete a side quest and solve a puzzle in order to obtain ammo for it. But, they get just one ammo token - which the invader player can take away from them with the card mentioned above. And any invader player's going to save a card for that, because since they can see the whole map, they know there's only one BFG ammo token available. Unfortunately, the marines don't get a card to remove the cyberdemon at the end, that the BFG's supposed to be used against. And yet, the scenario text describes the marines standing over the body of the dead cyberdemon as the end of the adventure; but no marine players are going to stick around to kill the cyberdemon when they can win just by sprinting through the exit hatch behind them!
The scenario booklet also includes rules for "campaign play" which, after a few games, had all of our players laughing and shaking their heads. You get to keep your marine's status between scenarios - including all the ammo and other things you've lost - although at least the invader's point count resets. Better yet, you get "kill points" for killing monsters and can trade them in between scenarios to purchase new tokens. Yup, you can buy an ammo token for the low, low price of 10 kill points (which would likely have taken at least two ammo tokens to achieve)
It is thus not absolutely clear if this is a deliberate attempt to create a game with a "grittier" feel that Space Hulk, D&D or others in the genre or an actual error in design. Although such a "gritty" feel would be an excellent twist to such a game, it was certainly not apparant from our games that any reasonable amount of skill could actually give the marines a win in any of the standard scenarios, and completing the campaign (which involves completing all the scenario on the trot without the invader player winning even one) seems beyond the realms of possibility. Exceptional luck might do the trick, especially given the operation of the ammo system, which drains an ammo token after just one shot at one moment and then lets you machine-gun everything in a room on one token the next.
Shortly after our initial experiences, the game's authors released an online expansion which added five different difficulty levels to the game (based on the difficulty levels in the video game). Our group then tried a game at the lowest difficulty setting, which played well, and although unfortunately we didn't have time to complete it, the marines weren't too close to being trashed were about three-quarters of the way through the scenario (although the invader did have a few points in hand). Rather worryingly, the online expansion also adds two difficulty levels described as being harder than the default game, which I can't seriously see anyone making use of.
So, to buy or not to buy? If you're really, really keen on Doom, or really demand that any dungeon-crawl type boardgame you want to play has to have guns in it, then as long as you don't mind a few rules tweaks, it should be a good bet. Equally, if you want to try a grittier and much harder version of the classic boardgame crawl, you might get on well with this, although again you might need to be prepared to tweak the rules slightly to make things fair for the players. However, if you're new to this type of boardgame, Doom isn't ideal as a first-time game; it may be better to go for one of the other options, such as the D&D board game, or Space Hulk if you can manage to find a copy, rather than jumping in on Doom right away.
