as it currently stands, it shares similarities to the way Imperial assault works, but a bit different, and what's great about this game is the turns are a lot faster paced compared to imperial assault

for those that are curious

the Marines are Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta

each Marine has a turn dictated by the DM's deck i don't recall the exact size but i believe it was something like 6 or 7 demon turns to the 4 hero turns and are randomly shuffled into a deck and drawn one at a time and played out

so sometimes your hero can be the last to activate and lots of punishment can come your way.. this can be good and bad, but acting later allows better dictation on what to do because the demons are less likely to get out of the way of things such as frag grenades

each hero has one basic ability (sprint which reads discard one card from you hand and perform 6 movement points) one special ability unique to each marine and a command deck that is used for both offense and defense (will go into that shortly)

if i remember correctly (i played 2 games one as charlie one as alpha) this was how it currently stands
Alpha's special ability allows him to change one attack die to any facing when attacking a demon at range 2 or closer
Bravo's special ability allows him to ignore movement penalties when moving through enemy figures
Charlie's special ability allows him draw a glory kill card (will discuss that shortly) at the start of his activation if he did not have one already
Delta's special ability allows him to discard a card from his hand at the start of an ally's to give them 1 movement point (i cannot remember if you could stack this ability on one hero or not) and also has an increased hand size of 4 cards (up from 3 that each other marine has)

each marine has 10 health
once a demon's health hits a certain threshold, which is usually anywhere from 1-3 hp from it's total health it becomes staggered. any marine that enters a space containing a staggered demon will automatically perform a glory kill on it, killing it instantly and drawing a glory kill card from the glory kill card deck. each glory kill card allows the marine to gain 2 health and gives them a special ability they can use, be it drawing more cards, gaining more movement, giving them defensive reaction abilities etc. the list goes on

the demon player also has a demon deck that he can use to make his demons stronger, become more resistant to being staggered (requiring more hits to become staggered) or just plain hitting you much harder

the demon player also gets to continually spawn more demons from round to round, making it crucial for the marine players to make smart moves and to continue moving towards the objectives while still putting punishment on the demons to avoid becoming completely overwhelmed.

if a marine dies, it's no big deal, you just get to respawn a certain locations and keep pushing the objective. In the scenario that was set up, these spawn locations were teleporters. the objective of the Demon player was to gain 6 frags in this scenario (6 marine kills) to win. it's not too easy for the demon player as you might think as there are plenty of things spread out on the map to aid the marines

just by walking over top of items, they can gain pick ups such as health packs to instantly gain 5 health off of their damage, picking up stronger weapons such as rocket launcher, gauss cannon, super shotgun etc to be able to add those cards into your deck

now for how damage and defense works, during your active turn you will always draw up to your total hand size at the end of your activation (it may have also been the beginning of your activation as well but i can't recall)

there are 2 forms of actions, quick actions; where you can perform as many of these as you wish and a full action; where you only get 1 and once you do a full action you cannot take any more quick actions

Full actions are generally your strong actions and in most cases come in the form of using a high powered weapon that also grants you the ability to move X amount of spaces (not including any of the additional movement granted from quick actions) and you roll subsequent dice (red, black or a combination of both)

black dice are much stronger with higher potential damage, where red have a lower output and even a chance to miss with blank roll, so the more black dice you can muster, the better

once the damage has been rolled, defense is applied by pulling the top card off the top of your deck and put into your graveyard, damage is mitigated by the number of armor shields printed in the top right corner, which currently range from 0-3 and there is also one card called "reposition" which evades the attack altogether
there is also the armor card, which while it is in your hand, can be played as a reactionary card and can instantly nullify 2 damage on top of what is drawn from your defense bringing the potential damage mitigation of 5

this game was very cast paced and i look forward to the game coming out in the near future. i'm not sure there are too many issues with how the game currently stands (i'd need more play with different scenarios to really determine how good this game is) but as of right now my only complaint is that the set does not come with any Hell Knights in the base game and i truly believe there should be hell knights as they are quite a mainstay demon from the beginning stages of the video game all the way through to the end

i also hope they come out with more marine types with different weapons. as it stands, alpha has a shotgun, bravo has a plasma rifle, charlie has a chainsaw and delta has a chaingun

all of the miniatures are beautifully sculpted and i look forward to painting these wonderful demons and Marines

thanks FFG, i really think you hit this one out of the park, especially if there is a great campaign to come with boss fights, which i assume there must be with a cyberdemon that comes in the box. I look forward to seeing a spider demon and hell guards

the Marines are Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta

Argh, bit of a missed opportunity.

Thanks for the review though!

the Marines are Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta

Argh, bit of a missed opportunity.

Thanks for the review though!

how so? the marines never had names in any of the games that i can recall

Flynn "Fly" Taggart, aka Doomguy. Lt. Weems, Bill Ritch, Arlene Sanders, etc.

From the Doom novels.

It would have been a nice reference.

The Doom novel series is a series of four near-future science fiction novels co-written by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver; Knee-Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky, and Endgame. The series is initially based on the Doom and Doom II: Hell on Earth first-person shooter video games created by Id Software, although there are multiple departures from the game in the first two novels, and the second two continue in an independent direction to the games' storylines. The novels are primarily written from the first-person perspective of Flynn Taggart, a corporal assigned to Fox Company of United States Marine Corps, although the perspective changes from character to character in the second and third novel.

It doesn't sound like these novels were very much concerned with maintaining continuity with the video games (which is pretty much exactly what I've come to expect of novelizations of video games, btw.) As such, I don't consider it much of a loss that they're being ignored by future installments in the franchise. Personally, I don't even consider these things canon to the games they're based on, except in a few exceptional cases, let alone canon to games that reboot the franchise 20-odd years later.

I mean, some people are already getting worked up about FFG incorrectly naming the UAC "United Aerospace Corporation" instead of "Union Aerospace Corporation", whereas these novels apparently do away with the UAC entirely and make "Doomguy" a US Marine. Also, from what little story existed in the first game, I seem to recall Doomguy being a penal soldier, not a voluntary defender of our rights and freedoms. I would also be very surprised if that "independent direction" mentioned regarding the last two books was, in any way, incorporated into the 2014 DOOM game upon which this board game is actually based.

I see lots of reasons to ignore those books, very few to include them.

I'm also not too sad about them ignoring The Rock's Doom movie - I'm sure there were some names they could have pulled from there.

Oh-hoho, the third and fourth novels have little to do with Doom in any sense of the word aside from casual references to some of the monsters. Really, you stop believing that you're reading a "Doom" novel when it starts talking about Magilla-Gorilla aliens named Sears and Roebuck.

I can attest that none of the games borrow anything from those novels. The only references to any of the novels really, comes from fan-made mods. And then, mostly just the name of the main character, Flynn.

What's odd to me is how FFG designed an AI deck with their Gears of War board game that did a pretty solid job. Just having that as an option would be nice.

i hope they have a secondary skirmish style play with up to 4 players, otherwise i'm going to make a house rule

something like, each player takes a marine, put spawn locations in 4 corners of the map and take turns, first one to 5 frags wins, or something.. could be interesting especially with weapon pick ups and such