Hecatomb is dead! LONG LIVE HECATOMB!

When the core theme of a game is death, it's somewhat fitting when the game dies on the vine. And this was the fate of Hecatomb, a dark, sophisticated, and intricately designed CCG from Wizards of the Coast (of Magic: The Gathering fame). It came, it struggled through two expansions, and it heaved a pus-speckled bloody sigh before expiring twitching on the altar of the Magic-dominated and PG-friendly market.

Why did Hecatomb croak? Adherents and latecomers (I'm the latter) have their theories; the two easiest scapegoats are the game's art and theme (dark, gory, miserable) and its format (bold and brilliant, but thoroughly incompatible with existing CCG "infrastructure" [deck boxes, binder sleeves, conventional storage])

Which is a shame.

Because there was some exceptionally brilliant design behind Hecatomb; ideas that took the traditional monsters-plus-modifiers mechanics of all (or nearly all) other CCGs and adapted them into something quite clever.


The OTHER Evil Pentagon

Format first, then. Hecatomb (as you can see in the BGG image library) doesn't use standard playing-card-sized cards. First, the cards are plastic -- brilliant for keeping them clean and stain-free, and possibly (haven't tried it) writing on them with a dry-erase marker. This is not, I stress, done just to be different or to annoy consumers or -- as some more conspiratorially-minded gamers have suggested -- to force people to buy more CCG infrastructure for the game.

Each card is a pentagon, with the card name and some relevant information on one side of the pentagon, while the other four edges are transparent. So if you put one card on top of another one and rotate it 20% -- one-fifth -- and the edges match, you will be able to see the name of two cards; the one on top and the one directly underneath it, showing through one of the four transparent edges of the top card (and leaving three edges still "empty").

It's part of the core mechanic of the game, which ties directly to the theme of the game, which is this:

You're making monsters.

Creature Plus Modifier Equals Yawn

In Magic and almost every other CCG, you can "summon" monsters, or "create" them, or what have you, which consists of putting a card on the table. Which rolls out like this:

PLAYER ONE: I play my Smurf card!
(Player One puts a Smurf card on the table).
PLAYER ONE: I give my Smurf some Magic Beans!
(Player One plays a "Magic Beans" card on his Smurf card)
PLAYER ONE: And I give all Smurfs plus-one armor!
(Player One plays a "All Smurfs Have Plus-One Armor" card)

And it works. It's a great mechanic. But after a long time playing Magic, it gets both "samey" and "fiddly," as the game designers keep piling on more and more (and increasingly convoluted) mechanics to try to increase synergy. You move from "Paladin plus Holy Strength" to sixteen-card combos that take six hours and a PhD in theoretical physics to untangle.

MAGIC PLAYER: Okay, I have my Thallid Spore Generator in play, which creates three Spore Tokens per turn, and I can convert two Spore Tokens to a 1/1 Spore Creature during my upkeep, but my Thallid Juggler lets me transform any Spore Creature into a +1/+1 bonus token on itself, and my Rastik's Converter lets me transfer any bonus token from one creature to another, and my Thallid Cleric gets +1/+1 for every six Spore Counters in play, so my dual-land generator can be tapped to...

... you see what I mean. Magic, once a tight and interesting game, has become a sprawling set of hyper-specialized sub-rules, with sub-rules for the sub-rules and effects that affect the effects of affected effects.

Hecatomb has an elegant solution: rather than have monsters plus enchantments plus equipment, it has monsters that you build by stacking the monsters themselves.

...How To Build Monsters the Hecatomb Way!

Remember those five-sided cards? The reason you can see through the sides is so you can stack up to five monsters on top of each other to create an "abomination," and the visible text through the transparent sides creates complementary effects.

And a size-one abomination... one monster card (called Minions in Hecatomb-speak) is nigh-useless. They just sit there, unable to attack or defend, generally (with some exceptions) inert.

But wait! There's more to it than that, even. There are four factions (called "dooms") in Hecatomb, represented by four colours: grey, blue, red and green. And when you play minions on top of other minions to create these abominations, different minions have effects that trigger if you play them on a minion of the right colour. Some of the best cards in the game are mediocre in their own right, but awesome if you get the right combination of minions in your abomination.

As a system, it's initially more complex than Magic -- not as intuitive -- but in terms of actual gameplay, it is remarkably more straightforward and streamlined. As said above: brilliant, or close to it.

And fun? Heck yes. HELLA fun. A little hard to wrap your head around at first, but a great time once you get the hang of it. The game shines when you play with three or four people, much more than with two (in my experience).

You Win vs. They Lose -- Pleasantly Finite Victory Conditions

Another interesting mechanic is that your goal -- collect 20 souls, with one being given to you automatically at the start of every turn -- is finite. Which means two things: generally, a game can last at most 15 turns (players start with five souls each), and you play to win, not play to make others lose. It's a subtle difference, but it adds to the enjoyment of the game -- you're racing to the finish, and usually trying to "reap" souls from other players to get there first, but your winning has no direct connection to other players being reduced to zero or destroyed. There are Hecatomb strategies that revolve entirely around gaining more souls for yourself while denying other players the opportunity to collect them -- with no overt aggression.

Of course, the theme of the game dictates that when you win, all of Creation is destroyed, but what can you do. I appreciate the "you win -- not they lose" approach to scoring, and find it immediately opens strategies unavailable in a lot of other CCGs. Some CCGs can grind into hours of play, as players shuffle their discard piles into their decks, re-gain life through a variety of methods, and stall, stall, stall. Stalling is practically impossible in Hecatomb (probably, admittedly, because the game died before any expansions with game-shattering staller cards were introduced). But Hecatomb ends. Within 15-20 minutes, usually. And that's a good thing.

Hair Metal Dark, Not Charles Manson Dark

The theme is dark. Super dark. And weird. Super weird. The boxes themselves say it's for people 13+, and I'd be hesitant in letting any child even flip through the cards, let alone play the game. A significant misstep for Wizards, I imagine; I think they saw the late-high-school to college-age Magic crowd and thought it might be ripe for a darker, more mature game, but didn't follow the money trail back to Mom and Dad, which is where a lot of the cash for a kid's Magic fix comes from.

To say nothing of the fact that the cards are just plain gross sometimes, and you get more flies with cheery elves and winsome dwarves than you do with an alien that peels your skull off and poops in your brain.

So to speak.

There's a sense of humour in there, but it's a sense of humour by way of Jhonen Vasquez or Chuck Palahniuk -- grim, sinister, and so far over the top it's already on the other side of the dang mountain. But it's silly dark. Sure, you could take it seriously, but it's like trying to listen to Cannibal Corpse and not smile -- it's just silly dark half the time. If you aren't playing Hecatomb and occasionally pumping a hand with the "devil horns" in the air and saying "My abominations are TOTALLY F&?%$ING METAL", you're probably not getting it. It's Michael Jackson Thriller dark. It's that guy in high school that painted a goat head on his Camaro dark. It's goofy dark.

After The Universe Ends I Stil Have Money For A Comic Book And Some Pizza

The best thing about Hecatomb?

The very best thing?

It's cheap.

It's disgustingly cheap.

You can pick up whole boxes of boosters for under $10 on eBay and through various sites like Wholesale Gaming, and even with shipping to Canada it's been a ridiculously affordable game to play. Plus, since it's "dead," there's no concerns about cards being phased in or phased out, no rules changes, no game-shattering mechanics or uber-cards being introduced. My friends and I have built a set of "stable" Hecatomb decks that we play for fun, just like we do with Blue Moon, Bang!, Munchkin or other card-driven games. A couple of boxes of the core set and a box of Blanket of Lies (second expansion) got us in -- now I'm waiting on more boxes of the core set and two boxes of the first expansion to flesh things out and build even better decks.

So -- if you have a grim sense of whimsy and enjoy CCGs, Hecatomb is a fantastic break from the labyrinth of rules and meta-cards that have crept over Magic like kudzu; a breath of foetid air in a world of games that promise a fresh look at CCGs but wind up delivering another variation of monster-plus-gear-equals-fight.

And it's cheap.

Cheaper than any Apocalypse should be, really.

Hecatomb is great.

http://www.wholesalegaming.com/hecatomb/ for ebayphobics.

Starters are $2 or $10 for 8. Boosters are $10 for a 24 pack box.

This week, base boosters are $6 a box.

I found the blanket of lies cards *less* dark, and easier to introduce to people :P

I managed to buy about 2500 cards ( pents?) for less than a 100 bucks

Would you be willing to post your "stable" decks to help the rest of us get started with some ideas?

Yes, but not quite yet -- as mentioned, I'm waiting on some more boxes (I took advantage of the Wholesale Gaming sale to pick up two more base set boxes) to get multiple rares for better set-building.

One current "stable" deck (because I'm going gonna get any more Blanket of Lies in the short term) is an all-alien deck. Almost all BoL cards with a few "retrieve/recycle artifacts" from Set I; I also removed the Deceit (IIRC) card that lets you remove the top minion from an abomination and, if it's an alien, remove another minion... from general circulation as that would kill the whole idea (the all-alien squad would be removed from the game in one fell swoop). The alien deck plays strong but not TOO strong.

Part of the challenge is that you're not building GREAT decks, you're building "decent and interesting" decks...

Cheap is great. However, my CCG partner and I found the plastic tiles to be impractical for storing, shuffling, stacking, holding, etc., so my cheap boxes remain in my closet unplayed.

How many boosters do you suggest buying to have a good pool of cards for two people to play with?

There was a guy who went to my middle school who carved Cannibal Coprse into his arm with a knife. He did not smile.

Holy cow! Lots more interest in this than I thought there'd be.

Shuffling is a pain in the butt. No way around it; especially if you want to shuffle AND keep all the cards lined up so the "tops" are all the same. But in terms of just shuffling for randomizing and not caring if they wind up facing in any of five directions, try doing a standard shuffling "riffle" to web the two stacks together, and then gently tapping them into one stack instead of the sort of "pushing" action you do with standard cards. Works for me! As far as storage goes, I just have the decks rubber-banded and in an old box.

We've been having a great time so far with one box of base set and one box of BoL, but I'm getting more. There are only four "factions" in the game, so a couple of booster boxes should be enough to get going on.



Ah, he was probably smiling on the inside.

Excellent, funny, fun to read, informative review. Write more.

Good review + cheap == my interest.

And yes, write more. This was an excellent review.

When it first came out I thought the game mechanisms looked really cool and wanted to try it out from that standpoint. But I'm in the category of folks who were turned off big time by the theme and art.

It seems WotC toned the idea down a bit for Dream Scape (though not enough for my tastes) and it appears to be much more successful.



I certainly hope so. It seemed like a lot of suffering for no joy to be derived from it. Either way, I wouldn't want to encourage or reinforce such behaviour.

There's an ebay seller by the name of thehowlingmine_2004 that sells an "Ultimate Starter set" for Hecatomb. 2 decks and 6 boosters from each set for a Buy-it-now of $15. That gives you a good set of cards to get a feel for the game and it's expansions, I think.


Link to an example auction:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?type=4&cam...

I like the game--it's a fun play. Don't knock yourselves out trying to tune up ideal deck--play a couple of dooms and you'll be fine. I was really into it in the initial rollout, but the community just never appeared. Like most Lovecraft CCGs, it was binned in no time (wither Mythos? :cry. Let me see if i can dredge up my original list....

Nope. All I remember is it was Red Black and ran Nahual, which was amazing.

this game, perhaps more than any other CCG I have played, could use a user-community rules revision. "Stitching" is just about impossible to comprehend. Making "triggered" abilities optional is design limiting. the flipflop from 40 to 60 card decks is embarrassing. WotC was all over the place on this and just let it get away. Now that enthusiasts have the market we should develop it into a real community.

And does anyone know the rarity distribution? Is there 1 rare per pack.

From the checklist spreadsheet available in the files section, I count 48 rares in the base set, 48 in Last Hollows Eve, and 24 in Blanket of Lies.

Does that mean it's about 2+2+1 boxes to get almost all the cards?

Of course. I assume they're not, hence the "about" and "almost".

But that's another good question: can anyone comment on the collation? Good, bad, ugly?

Collation in WotC products is usually pretty good - you buy a box of boosters, you get few in any duplicate rares in that box.

I just ordered 1 box of starters, and one box of each expansion/boosters from the wholesale gaming place. Thanks for that link, this game looks interesting.

Collation could definitely have been better. I routinely saw the same cluster of commons in the same order pack after pack, and the one time that I bought two booster boxes of the same set at once, they contained nearly identical rare selections (which isn't all bad, since most rares are worth having x3 of if they're worth having at all).

It's worth noting that since Blanket of Lies was only 72 cards, meaning 24 of each rarity, and there are 24 boosters in a box, one box is fairly likely to contain precisely one of each rare (that part of the collation seems to be good, as I got all different rares from my one box and my friend Barac, who got me into the game when he found it on wholesalegaming.com, only had one missing/duplicate rare). So theoretically, you're fairly likely to get complete playsets of every card out of 15 booster boxes, which from wholesalegaming would amount to some 141 dollars plus shipping - lots of money, but a lot less than you'd pay for full playsets of three Magic expansions (or even for a full single set, unless you were quite lucky).

Also note that unless you buy the cardboxes ($2 each, and sized to hold two 60-card decks, back to back or with the aid of an included divider which also lists the game's keywords for reference), you're basically going to have to just haul your cards around loose in boxes, rubber bands, wrapped up in paper or something; problematic.

Whatever you do, don't buy starter decks UNLESS you plan on keeping your investment in the game down. One box of starters plus one of the three-box deals is a good plan for getting an entire game for under $50 (after shipping); the starters are common-heavy and the commons (base set commons specifically) are critical for building decent decks, so if you only ever want a few hundred cards with which to build 1-6 decks, this is a good plan. But if you're going to want the whole game, buy booster boxes; you'll already have about 30 of each common card by the time you have 3 of each rare, but if you bought boosters the ratio would be more like 25 commons per rare. And that's just not that fun. If you're a completist like me, you don't ever need to buy the starter decks, save perhaps one just so you have the rulebook.

Well, thanks to Matt's (rather excellent) review and the Hill Wholesale deal, I've just ordered up a 1000-or-so cards, complete with cases to store them.

The game looks like an interesting Abomination of MtG and CoCCCg. Looking forward to introducing my gaming buddies to it

I loved/still love this game. I have all the cards x3 along with extra commons/uncommon sets if anyone needs them. I also have both the offical deck boxes as well as the Brom metal ones. I'll have to post pics of them and my custom abomonation trays. I was playing this from day one when it came out but haven't played it in a while.

I think the biggest fault of this game not succeeding what the fact that wizards did very little to advertise. If they were smart they would have had ran adds in metal magazines and pushed the "evil" them even further. The fact that people made/make excuses for it is part of the problem.

Hail Hecatomb!

I ordered two boxes from wholesellgaming to be divided between me and two other friends. I haven't played muc hyet but the more I get a feel for it the more I like it. I just might buy some more in the future.

Bri

Wonderful review - thanks for all the info and the wholesale gaming link.