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Of all the video game franchises in all the genres in all the world, Doom is perhaps one of the strangest choices to turn into a board game. While it didn’t quite invent the first-person shooter, the first Doom—which came out in 1993 and is therefore older than most current pop stars—totally revolutionized gaming, sending players scrambling through endless gun-metal corridors, shooting the hell out of menacing pixel clusters that vaguely resembled demons. Can that experience be replicated in a top-down board game?

I was 10 when Doom appeared, and it made me thoroughly motion-sick—an affliction that continues to this day. The more leisurely turn-based experience of the new board game version is thus the perfect way for me to enjoy the Doom experience without a constant need to barf, even though the board game is mechanically different in every way from its video game predecessor.

Instead of simulating one marine against the world in real time and in three pseudo-dimensions, the new Doom is a dungeon-crawler with big guns and biomechanical monsters rather than big axes and skeletons. Between one and four heroes face off against another player controlling the forces of Hell. The setup is similar in a lot of ways to Fantasy Flight Games’ premier trad-fantasy crawler Descent: Journeys in the Dark (and also the very similar Star Wars skirmish game Imperial Assault), but there’s enough difference in the two rulesets to let Doom stand comfortably apart.

Game details Designer: Jonathan Ying

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Players: 2-5

Age: 14+

Playing time: 120-180 minutes

Price: $99.69/ Jonathan YingFantasy Flight Games2-514+120-180 minutes: $99.69/ ~£60

Even though this two-to-five player turn-based strategy game plays very differently, it absolutely nails the feel of the video game experience. No matter how many marines are running around each facility—durable double-sided cardboard tiles that clip seamlessly together to build space-base or hellscape-themed maps—there’s always that delicious feeling of rising chaos as your team tries to collect better weapons in order to blow away increasingly savage waves of plastic monsters while still completing objectives.

That feeling of satisfaction you get in the video game when you find a railgun or a chainsaw and you go on a rampage? The designers have bottled that exquisitely, even though it manifests now in totally different ways. Similarly, the sensation of being overwhelmed and savaged by endlessly spawning monsters is right out of the video game, as is the relief of grabbing a medpac and the fact that marines respawn at teleporters upon death. The board game even simulates the manic glee of getting a gib on a particularly big nasty.

This is actually a reimplementation of the game’s first edition, which came out in 2004 and was big and garish and explicitly influenced by Games Workshop’s seminal game of interstellar alien-hunting, Space Hulk. Doom was eventually published by Fantasy Flight Games, which used it as a basis for Descent, before quietly shelving hellish sci-fi in favor of its swords ’n’ sorcery IP.

This creates a fine lineage: each new iteration of the Doom rules builds upon its forebear. Where Descent can get slow and grindy, Doom always feels frenetic. It does this by linking the marines’ actions to small decks of cards which let you move, shoot, react, reposition, and defend yourself. Even with new weapons, these decks are tiny, recycling themselves quickly enough that you’re rarely stuck for a decent shot or the chance to leg it. Each weapon—each marine begins with two—adds three cards into the deck. The basic ones feel meaty enough, but the advanced weapons are very satisfying indeed; it's always worth the effort of battling across the map to grab them.































The weapons work and feel much as they do digitally: the chaingun fires quickly, the chainsaw brings that berserker abandon, and the BFG 9000 is a slow-firing monster.

There’s an elegance to the way the deck cycles. Everyone maintains a hand of three cards, and when they’re shot at, they draw the top card and deduct the number of shields in the top-right corner from the damage rolled on the dice, giving each card multiple uses. Crucially, unlike in Descent, there’s no chance of a miss—everything here is about damage mitigation, making it feel much less like you’re at the vicious whims of cruel happenstance. Because both marines and beasties are quite fragile, however, it’s still possible to feel dogpiled, watching a healthy grunt go from full health into the sweet release of death before getting a chance to save himself. But that too is not unlike moments in the video game franchise.

Doom is built up of managed chance in this way. Turn order is dealt with via a small deck of cards, one for each marine and one more for each active group of monsters. In this way, it’s possible for one guy not to get much of a go before he’s eviscerated by marauding demons, but it generally balances out and adds a little enjoyable uncertainty to the whole affair.

The Invader, as the villain player is called, plays a little differently. Each scenario—there are 12 included—has a card that explains which monsters can be teleported in through rifts of different colors and nastiness that start on the board. If the marines don’t deal with the flimsy early waves, they can end up monstered when the big boys (of which there are several, including an eight-inch model of a cyberdemon that takes up eight spaces and will usually ruin your day) turn up. The demons are, generally speaking, softer than the marines, but they’re bolstered by their own deck of cards. Each individual unit has a limited number of actions, but the cards can be used to make them tougher, faster, and more deadly—or to spring traps on our unsuspecting heroes. The cards also double as damage mitigation, just as they do with the marines.

The game plays as well with two players as it does with five, something that must have been difficult to balance. We don’t recommend playing with two players and a full complement of marines, though. The hand management can become quite complicated, and the game slows down a lot. If you have fewer people to play with, the game is actually pretty well tuned for lower numbers of marines, and there’s a significant bump in power (extra health or a larger hand) granted for each marine you’re lacking. There’s even a particular pleasure to be found playing as the solo superhero marine.