Doomlings Review – Great For A Chat, Bad For A Plan

Disclaimer: Doomlings was provided for free by Doomlings LLC, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

I always try to keep an open mind reviewing board games. However, there’s a type of game I try to avoid. You know the type. Board games that hit the mainstream because of their humourous artwork rather than their gameplay.

Doomlings is one of those games.

Or at least so I thought.

How to play

Doomlings is the largest abstraction of life possible. The game begins with the first spark of life on a new planet and ends with the apocalypse. In between, an age passes with each round you play.

During your turn, you add new traits to a never-before-seen species. This evolves your creature and, more importantly, gives you victory points.

But way before the James Cameron-esque explosions that leave skeletons clinging to fences. You get a Gene Pool card that lets you know your current hand size. Expect this to change throughout the game, although at the start everyone begins with a hand of five.

Taking turns, you play one trait card from your hand to your trait pile. These cards may have passive effects or one-time actions when played. However, they all have a set number of points they’ll give you at the end of the game.

Take the Territorial card for example, it gives you a point but when played it forces all opponents to discard one red card. Or the Sweat card that gives two points but causes you to discard a card from your hand to play it.

There are also more powerful Dominant Traits that offer larger game-defining effects and actions. As such, you can only have two in your trait pile at one time and they can’t be stolen or destroyed.

The round ends after everyone’s had a turn and you draw a new Age card. Changing the rules for the next round of play. Often these Age cards are a hindrance, like those that stop you from playing a certain colour. However, some are more generous like the one that lets you draw additional cards at the start of the round.

Sometimes instead of drawing an Age card, you’ll draw a Catastrophe card instead. These were shuffled into the Age deck during setup and tend to ruin your plans. Either by reducing your hand size or carrying out some other heinous effect.

In addition, they add a scoring condition (usually negative) to the end of the game. For instance, the Mass Extinction card makes you discard a played green card before you score. Meanwhile, the Solar Flare card subtracts a point for every purple card you’ve played.

After the third Catastrophe card, the game ends and you move on to scoring. The player who collected the most victory points is declared the winner.

I don’t want a drumstick, I want the whole chicken

Doomlings is far from a daring game design. The idea of maximising your score from the cards you play has been done to death, and outside of its humorous approach to biology, I don’t think there’s anything novel here.

That’s not to say the game isn’t fun.

While it doesn’t push any boundaries, it sits comfortably within them and delivers an enjoyable experience. Although not an exciting one.

Similarly to Exploding Kittens and Munchkin, part of Doomlings’ charm is that it’s light enough to play while still being able to carry a conversation. Allowing you to exercise the calculating part of the brain and be social at the same time.

However, unlike those other titles, Doomlings is much, much more enjoyable.

This is despite it feeling like a luck-driven card game… Which also happens to be my biggest complaint.

Doomlings is at its best when you get a hand of synergetic cards that all work together to give you victory points. However, the draw deck for traits is so large that you have better chances of winning the lotto than drawing the cards you want.

For instance, there are ten Kidney cards scattered throughout the deck. The more you collect, the more points they are worth. Yet in all the games I played, I never managed to draw more than two Kidneys per game.

This is one example, but it goes for all strategies within Doomlings.

Wanting to do more than just rely on lady luck is so unreliable that it becomes frustrating if you take the game too seriously.

Now, if the trait deck was tightened up so that every turn you could pull off an interesting play, Doomlings could easily be worth recommending to even the most hardcore of board gamers. As it stands, however, it’s enjoyable but doesn’t have the same crunch as Jump Drive and Res Arcana.

And where I’m at in my board game journey, I don’t want a drumstick, I want the whole chicken.

Still, when it comes to lighter, more casual card games that you can pick up and play with anyone who can read, Doomlings is a great choice.