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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.
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Posted Thu Aug 16,2007 03:14 pm
