Chris McDowall and Osprey Games’ latest skirmish wargame has light core rules, wild scenarios, and a call to cut loose and kitbash some crazy minis.
A miniatures skirmish game, with simple rules, no measuring of distances, and an ethos of “playing to see what happens”. Players bring their own miniatures, from any game range they like – or “kitbashed” from parts.
Game play is semi-competitive, with two player-controlled teams competing over the same scenario, with an automated “Horror” that threatens both teams.
Players alternate activating a character, with each character taking up to three actions. Actions (movement, attacks, saves) involve a six-sided die rolled and compared to a single “Quality” stat for that character.
The Doomed is a skirmish wargame with lightweight rules and heavy metal everything else. The setting – a sci-fi world abandoned by ‘The Company’ that settled it, now haunted by Horrors from beyond the stars – would fit right at home in the darker corners of the Warhammer 40k universe.
The core rules by Chris McDowall are incredibly light, fitting onto 10 pages. Models have a single stat, Quality, which ranges from 3+ for a leader to 5+ for a basic minion. Models get three actions per turn, and everything but the first move in a turn requires a roll equal to or over Quality to succeed.
There’s no range measurement. Battles take place on small boards about the size of a Kill Team board, with plenty of terrain. A movement is any distance across open ground in a straight line, or vaulting an obstacle, climbing a wall, leaping a small gap. Fail a Quality roll to move and your opponent gets to place you, leaving you out in the open.
Weapons have two stats: the number of dice they roll to attack and the number of saves the opponent needs to make for each attack that hit. Again, these are rolls against Quality.
The Horror, though, is something else. A monster, warmachine, cult, sentient dust storm, echo of sin, zombie horde, or any other unimaginable threat, each Horror has deadly weapons, weird abilities, and can only be killed when its three ‘Nexuses’ are destroyed.
The Doomed delivers on the central promise: it’s a skirmish warband game that gives you many excuses to get your weirdest kit bashes on the table. The central rules are light, but that slack is taken up by incredibly varied missions and blossoming options for warband customisation. Combat swings between inconclusive and utterly lethal, producing memorable, sometimes ridiculous turns of fate.
This one had all the elements but it didn’t quite gel for me.
Sounds like a fun beer-n-pretzels game!
Opponent gets to play you? That doesn’t sound good at all!
Yep!
It sounds like a pretty interesting game for some oddball beer & pretzels smash ups, but I get why a super minimalist design like that might leave you feeling ”meh”.
I feel like most small skirmish games suffer from “sameness syndrome” — the mechanics & game play feel samey and uninspiring, and it’s up to a cool scenario/story to save things. This sounds like one of those games where a great scenario & cool looking toys is a must.
Thanks TPH. It is true that many skirmish games are similar but some of the newer ones are excellent and require “proper” small squad tactics to succeed.