Spring Clean Challenge: Every Game is Miniatures Agnostic

The Doomed has an interesting structure to it. Player-controlled warbands compete over what the game calls Conflicts, generally goal-based objectives like occupying the opponent’s staring area, securing sections of the board, or singling out and destroying specific enemy targets. This is made more complicated by the presence of a non-player Horror, a powerful character who attacks both players with equal abandon.

The rules specify that you can skip using a Conflict if you want a more cooperative game, and this is what we decided on for our first game.

I worked up stats using the Martyr Retinues faction as a loose stand-in for Predator’s human cast. Since there would be two of us playing, I split the characters into two squads: one with Dutch leading Hawkins, Poncho, and Billy, and the other featuring Blain, Mac and Anna, led by Dillon. I stuck to the game’s as-written rules for creating warbands, with one exception: I wanted Anna to function like she did in the film, with no weapons but a deeper insight into the Predator, so I came up with some special rules for her that I hoped wouldn’t break the game.

The Doomed has rules for creating your own Horrors, but as it turns out I didn’t need to: the game’s Warped Hunters are clearly meant to be stand-ins for the Predator. Well, three of them, actually…

We set up a 3×3 jungle board covered in trusty plastic aquarium plants, and placed the Predators in cover along the center of the board. The rules for Horrors in The Doomed include placing Nexuses, 3 tokens that player units can interact with. In the case of the Warped Hunters, these nexus tokens remain attached to the three Horrors, with each one being destroyed the first time a Hunter is wounded by a player action. Destroying each one triggers an in-game effect (one helpful to the players, the other two not so much), and the Hunters can’t be killed until all three nexuses are destroyed.

For Anna’s special rules, I decided that she never got targeted by the Predators and couldn’t make attacks, but if she moved into contact with a Nexus she could remove it without needing to wound the Predator — simulating her finding the Predator’s blood on the leaves in the film, and providing the insight that “if it bleeds, we can kill it.”

The actual rules are pretty simple. Each character’s only stat is their Quality Level, which gives them a target number to roll when attacking, resisting damage, or attempting additional movement. Interestingly, there’s no range or measuring; movement is as far as you want in a straight line (so terrain has to be placed carefully to avoid long, clear avenues) and ranged attacks are at line of sight. Characters will have one or two special abilities that give them conditional bonuses, and different weapons determine how many dice are rolled in an attack, and how much damage each success deals.

Overall we enjoyed the game’s simplicity, but there were two game elements we didn’t care for. The first was damage: when a unit takes damage (by failing to save against one or more attack-inflicted hits), you roll on a table to see what happens. This part we liked, as it adds a little flavor to the effects of being hit, with results that could give the victim a free move or attack, or have them go into a panic and attack a nearby friendly. However, any roll of doubles results in the target being killed as soon as the effect resolves, which we found to be a little too egregiously random — we lost two characters on turn 1 due to unlucky dice rolls, which is kind of a problem when the average warband is only going to contain 4-6 characters in total.

The second element we didn’t care for is that some attack rolls are only 1 die, and there is something deeply unsatisfying about rolling a single d6.

Despite losing two of our characters on the first turn, and another on turn 2, we won the game on turn 3 by killing all 3 Predators. It’s possible that our special rules for Anna and/or our decision to play fully coop gave us an unfair advantage, and I do think that simply trying to simulate the action from the first Predator film didn’t really give the game an opportunity to shine.

I think The Doomed might work better as a full-on Aliens vs. Predator game, and with that in mind I’m going to work up stats for Aliens and Predators as playable warbands. I’m sure there is at least one Horror in the game that will make a good stand-in for the Aliens, which will give us options to play Aliens, Predators or humans as player warbands, with either Predators or Aliens as the NPC horrors. That will also give us an opportunity to try out the PvP conflicts in a way that makes more sense.