What is Doom and how much does it cost?

Doom is Fantasy Flight's boardgame version of the Doom 3 PC game, for two to four players. It plays in about 2-3 hours. In England, it retails for just under £30, which is cheap for what you get. I know that our American cousins might laugh at this statement ($60 for a boardgame!!??) but unfortunately, that's the way of things in rip off England. This is probably about 2/3 of the cost of Descent, Doom's younger upstart sibling. I managed to obtain mine from Ebay for a tenner, anyway.



So what do you get for your money?

This is not a big box game, but rather the same size as Battlelore, Warrior Knights and Arkham Horror. In common with these Games, however, the box is literally packed full of components. In fact, I defy anyone to be able to shut the box properly with all of the inserts and components intact after the game has been played. These components include a wealth of futuristic dungeon floorplans (like the old GW Spacehulk ones) that fit together like jigsaw pieces; more counters and tokens than you can shake a stick at (and believe me, I can shake a stick at a lot of counters!); a deck of cards for marine special abilities and invader spawns and events and of course a wealth of sweet, sweet minis.



These deserve a paragraph all of their own. The plastic minis probably account for about half the weight of the (considerably heavy for it's size) box. There are about sixty in total, and they come in three colours (see gameplay, later).The Cyberdemon minis are about 4" tall and would make a decent paperweight. They are also well sculpted. If I had the time and artistic ability, I would love to paint my Doom minis. Unfortunately, with my artistic deficiencies, I fear the horrific invaders may well end up looking like a colourblind circus troupe...

Tell me about the gameplay!

Well, it's pretty straightforward, and it uses some rules from other dungeoncrawls. The marine players control one marine each, and the invader player controls the monsters. The amount and type of monsters scale in each scenario according to how many marines are playing - there are three marines and three different colours of monster. If a game has a red and a blue marine, only the red and blue monsters will be used, with all the green figures left in the box...

Much of Doom will be familiar to those who have played other Dungeoncrawls. The marines have a set goal (usually to exit through a specific door) and, of course, the invader's job is to stop them, usually by obtaining six frags. Frags are obtained by killing the marine players or by going through the entire invader deck. Unlike in Descent, however, there is, unfortunately no way to speed up this process.

The board develops as you play. When the marines enter a new area, the Invader player sets up the room tiles, monsters and ammo and reads a brief description of the room.

Marines have the usual choice of actions available to dungeoncrawling heroes, e.g. move/move, move/fight or fight/fight, as well as guard orders (overwatch) or specific actions such as dodge or aim. The Overlord then takes a new card and activates the monsters.

Combat is a little unusual as the dice rolled can indicate range, damage done, ammo used or a miss result - there is no combat results table. If the dice rolled are in range and no miss result is rolled, any damage over the armour rating of the target is taken off of the target's wounds. Only marines can lose ammo if an ammo icon appears on a dice face. If a marine loses all his wounds and is fragged, he is allowed to respawn next turn on a revealed space 8-16 spaces from where he died.

On the Invader player's turn, he can play spawn cards or special cards and activate his monsters, whose movement, armour, wounds, attack dice and special abilities are all listed on a handy reference card.

That's it? So what's so good about it? And why would I buy this if I already own Descent Journeys in the Dark?

Playing time. It has a shorter, more manageable playing time than Descent (2-3 hours).

The atmosphere. Doom is a game all about survival horror, with an emphasis on survival. With a good invader player, it's hard for the marines to win, and with ammo constantly being drained there can be a feeling of desperation for the marines.
It conveys a similar feeling of dread to the computer game, although I could easily see a Resident Evil conversion of the system... (drool)...

The Chrome. Doom has a ton of high quality bits, with excellent artwork and sculpts throughout.

The campaign system. It has a built in campaign system which makes sense. If the marines are lucky enough to survive until the next scenario (the game comes with six chronological scenarios) they become tougher and can take extra abilities. This is something which was not replicated in Descent...

Space Hulk. It's Space Hulk for the noughties. 'Nuff said.