The Doom video games are the story of a guy, colloquially called "the Doom guy", killing demons. The Doom legacy started within the Union Aerospace Corporation facility on Mars, where scientists were experimenting with teleportation and ended up unleashing extraplanar horrors into the company, and it hasn't really ever stopped since the game was first released in 1993. Doom is an in-your-face pioneer of power fantasy, in which the good guys are tough, fearless, and persistent, determined to keep killing until all the baddies have been ground into pulpy ichor. Seems like it would be difficult to emulate that experience as a tabletop board game, but in 2004 Fantasy Flight gave it their best shot with Doom: The board game. This is my review of a surprisingly direct and effective translation of a video game to the tabletop.
Doom isn't exactly a high-concept property, and I say that with admiration. You drop into the game as a space marine whose job is to kill the demons that have invaded a space base. There's no nuance to the characters, and the backstory isn't belaboured. In the original video game, you walk through corridors and rooms, you collect armour and weapons and ammo, and you kill until you are killed. And then, because it's a video game, you respawn and kill some more.
As a board game attempting to emulate this experience on your tabletop, Doom the Board Game starts with 2 elements that are vitally evocative. The game provides you with floor tiles that lock together so you can create floor plans of a base or research facility or space ship, or any industrial site you can imagine. It also provides a collection of really cool miniatures. You get 3 marine heroes, and at least 3 dozen demons of various types (zombie, trite, mancubus, demon, and even cyberdemons.) If Doom is a power fantasy, these miniatures are here to back it up. You're not playing with cardboard cutouts of demons, or little tokens or meeples. You play the game in 3d, just like the video game. Sure, they're miniatures, but put your head down on your tabletop and follow your tiny marine around the board like the POV camera of the video game, and everything feels HUGE.
To a versatile gamer, these are also great extra elements to have on your shelf. Corridors and rooms are the building blocks of a restrictive battlefield, such as a dungeon, industrial complex, death maze, spaceship, and so on. Lay down some flooring and use it as a map for your roleplaying game, or for a wargame like Warhammer 40,000 Boarding Actions or Black Ops. Or use them as components for a game of your own invention. Come up with your own mission map for Doom the Board Game (there are 5 in the box, and they're pretty replayable, but custom ones are fun too). I'm a big fan of raw materials, and these miniatures and tiles are excellent sci-fi or modern-future assets.
In the Doom video game, you shoot your way through a research facility. As you go, you find weapons and armour of increasing power, which enables you to take on progressively larger and meaner demons. You also find armour to protect yourself, and ammo to keep your weapons lethal.
In the board game, the same is true. You start with your fists, which uses a custom red dice for its attacks. Eventually you find a shotgun using red and blue dice, or a machine gun using blue and yellow and green dice. Maybe later you find a cache of grenades. Each weapon uses a different combination of specialty dice that effects your chance of hitting your target. Many weapons have extra attributes, like the ability to shoot through one enemy and hit an enemy standing behind it.
The dice don't always co-operate with you, of course. Sometimes you'll aim poorly, or you'll be too far away to damage your target, and other times you'll also exhaust your ammo. There are ammo drops throughout the board, but the eternal question is whether you'll be able to survive long enough to find them.
As in the video game, you're constantly on the lookout for better weapons, more armour, more ammo, health kits, and keys to locked doors. There aren't any complicated mechanics around switching weapons or reloading, so you can freely choose the very best weapon for whatever predicament you suddenly find yourself in. You feel powerful, because you know you're using the very best weaponry you have available. You never feel overly powerful though, because some of the demons you're up against are really deadly.
It's a nice balance that's hard to achieve. Obviously there are times when you don't feel powerful because you roll poorly and you either miss entirely or you're too far away from your target to hit. That's disappointing and frustrating, but you grunt loudly and flex your muscles and you're ready for the next round.
In the Doom the Board Game, there are up to 3 marine players and 1 Invaders player. The Invaders player controls all the demons and reveals any secrets the map might hold. It's not exactly a games master role, although it's good training for it. As the Invaders player, you get Doom cards that give you the ability to trigger Events and Spawns. You can play an Event any time, and it's always bad for the space marines. You can spawn once a turn, under specific conditions, and that's also bad for the space marines.
During your turn, you attack the space marines with as many demons you have on the board within range, and you play Events to either cause problems for the space marines or to buff your demons.
The goal of the Invaders player is to score 6 frags before the space marines reach their mission goal. You score a frag when a space marine loses all of its Wound tokens. To the space marine player, this feels like death, but luckily a dead space marine respawns nearby, just like in the video game. A lone space marine has the equivalent of 60 Wounds (10 for each spawn, including the initial spawn) but they go fast. The Invaders player has a lot of power and hits hard, so the threat is real and it keeps even the toughest marine on the run.
The interesting thing is that this adds to the power fantasy. When you play as a space marine, you respawn once and it feels special. You respawn 2 or 3 times, and you get lulled into a false sense of security. You're immortal. You can never die.
But you can.
You very much can.
Doom the Board Game isn't a wargame, but it's a great introduction to wargaming. You get a taste for blood in this game, you start thinking strategically, you issue orders, you think about action economy, and your chances of success, and tolerance for acceptable loss.
More importantly, you get to see the role of the story in a wargame. Unlike most board games or roleplaying games, a wargame is a snapshot of a specific scenario in what is assumed to be a larger battle. When you play a wargame, you're putting that snapshot under a microscope and examining every detail. It can be easy to lose sight of your ultimate goal when you're busy counting how many shells you have left and trying to figure out which marine you can sacrifice for the good of the squad. But it's important, I think, to keep the story in mind, and to consider how this battle contributes to the campaign (whether you're playing an actual campaign or not, your toy soldiers almost certainly think they are.) Doom the Board Game helps you retain story elements in your tactical wargame because the map does tell a story, in flavour text, in layout, and in loot drops. You can't lose sight of your goal or else you'll die to an ever-growing demonic horde. You have to keep moving.
Staying aware of the story is a subtle mental trick that some wargamers all but ignore, but others (including myself) value above and beyond tactics. Doom the Board Game deftly keeps tactics and story at the front of your mind as you play.
Designed by Call of Cthulhu creator Sandy Petersen, the cultural impact of the original Doom extends well outside video games. I don't think its story is what most of us think about when we think of Doom, but instead we think about the style in which it tells its gory tale. Style over substance might sound like an insult, but with Doom I think it's an important and endearing part of its success.
Doom is an enduring franchise, in part because its source code was gifted to its fanbase as open source under the terms of the GNU General Public License, which ensured it could be played on nearly every device imaginable. You can play it on consoles, on your PC, on an old phone, on a new phone, heck even in your web browser. New games in the series are still being released today. It's everywhere, including on your tabletop.