Spring Clean Challenge: Every Game is Miniatures Agnostic

We got in two more games of The Doomed. I statted up a group of Predators and some generic Marines, basing them on the miniatures from the Prodos AvP 2nd Edition boxed game. With two opposing player-controlled forces, I think we got a much better taste of how The Doomed is supposed to play, as opposed to our first game which was purely cooperative.

A full game of The Doomed uses a scenario-based Conflict, which is what the two players are competing over, and a Horror, which is the non-player monster that attacks and interferes with both players. You would think a common enemy would make the game semi-cooperative, but honestly it’s more like “let’s you and him fight,” hoping that the NPC will keep your opponent busy while you go after objectives or otherwise take advantage of the situation.

For our first game, we used the Devourer as our Horror, reskinned as the Alien Queen. This beast comes with six lower-powered minions that pop in and out over the course of the game — this idea appealed to me, due to the little-known fact that during the filming of Aliens, there were only six Alien costumes, meaning that you never saw more than six of them at a time.

For our Conflict we chose Ambush, which made sense from a narrative point of view, with the Predators setting a trap for the human Marines, only to find that they might have bigger problems. The victory conditions were simple: you win if more than half of your opponent’s force is dead, but the Alien Queen also has to die in order for the game to end.

The game against the Queen ended rather abruptly in the middle of round 2 (something I’ll discuss in more detail shortly), so we played a second game, this time against an unending horde of fairly low-powered Aliens. Our objective was to occupy two vantage points on the board, and overall the game was more satisfying than the first: with more non-player models on the board there was more going on, with the Predators getting dog-piled by Aliens at one end of the board, and the Marines trapped in a stairwell on the other while trying to get to one of the vantage points.

The tone of The Doomed is very on-brand for the AvP franchise, but in practice we found the game’s combat mechanics to be a little lacking. Each weapon has a rating describing how many dice are rolled, and how much damage each successful die inflicts, which is fine, but you occasionally find yourself only rolling one die when attacking, which often leads to egregious, arbitrary results. The defender then gets to roll a save against each point of damage — if any damage gets through, they have to roll on the dreaded Shock Table, which was paradoxically the most fun and the most aggravating part of the game.

The fun part is that the table makes taking damage more interesting, adding free moves and/or attacks for either the attacker or the defender. The aggravating part is that any roll of doubles means instant death for the defender, which we found to be really arbitrary, especially in a low model count game where you only have 3-5 characters in your squad. Out of three games, we only had one even make it to the third round, and all of them ended pretty abruptly, even after we modified the rule to only counting results of 2 or 12 as doubles.

I do like the structure of the game a lot — I like games with NPCs that liven things up and make the game more than “everyone run to the middle and fight.” Using Horrors and Conflicts to generate scenarios is a great idea, and we very much enjoyed that part of the game. I even like the idea of the Shock Table, making taking damage more interesting than just counting off hit points, but at the same time I think combat resolution needs something to make it a little less arbitrary.