Evolving to the End of the World

There’s something to be said for cute, family-weight games.

Sure, they aren’t always super-exciting, exercising your brain in the way that may keep it active until you’re 100 like some of the heavier games might.

But they’re cute!

Doomlings is definitely the cute, family-weight game rather than the heavy one, but that’s ok!

It still has lots going for it.

Doomlings is a 2-6 player card game designed by Justus and Andrew Meyer, with artwork by Justus and published in 2022 by Doomlings LLC.

The game is basically a race to play as many cards for points on the table as you can, and hopefully worth more points than the other players, before the world ends in disaster.

The trick is that there is a bit of engine-building as well, depending on the cards (or traits, as you are technically evolving your species every time you play a card) that you place in front of you.

Let’s go back to the beginning, though.

As I said, the theme of the game is that the world is ending.

This is demonstrated by the turning over of the next Age card in the stack of 13 cards.

The Age deck is divided into three sets of four cards: three Age cards and a Catastrophe.

Catastrophes are bad. (Editor: “Thanks, Captain Obvious.”)

Actually, they’re not always bad, as the Overpopulation catastrophe actually adds to your hand size and lets you draw a bunch of cards and rewards the player who evolved the least at the end of the game if it’s the final Catastrophe.

Regular Age cards will just affect the current round, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively.

The juicy part of all this is that the game ends when the third Catastrophe hits, with nobody taking a turn that round.

The other two Catastrophes, you just do the top effect of the card.

The final one, though, the world has ended! So you do the World’s End effect as well.

If you’ve been playing heavily in the blue trait gene pool, that Super Volcano will cost you a lot of points.

But what do I mean by that?

Traits are the cards that you will be playing, and they come in different colours (as well as “colorless”, which are really kind of gray).

On your turn, you will be playing one trait card in front of you, adding to your trait pile and essentially evolving your species.

If only it were that easy in real life!

These traits may have an effect when you play them, or maybe an ongoing effect, or possibly an end of game effect.

The Regenerative Tissue above (wouldn’t that be a handy evolution to have for real?) let’s you draw a card and play it immediately (if you can) whenever you discard a trait from your trait pile.

However, Heat Vision gets you a point for every red trait in your trait list at the end of the game.

The traits are what really make the back and forth in this game, and even the light engine-building.

I mean, it’s not Wingspan engine-building, but it’s there!

The other interesting twist in Doomlings is that your hand size will always be equal to the size of your Gene Pool, which will fluctuate during the game based on catastrophes and some of the traits you play.

When I say “hand size is equal,” I truly mean that.

If you don’t have that number of cards in your hand, you draw up.

If you have more than that number of cards in your hand, you discard.

It’s that simple!

The uncertainty of when the catastrophes are going to come is one of the things that makes Doomlings shine.

When you’re setting up, you deal three Age cards and a Catastrophe in to a pile three times, so you have three different piles of four cards.

Then you shuffle each pile and pile them on top of each other.

So two Catastrophes could come consecutively, or there could be a bunch of time in between.

And the end of the world could come any time in the last four cards!

I do really enjoy the variety of ways to win, which of course does depend on the cards that you draw, so it is super random in a way.

Hell, it’s a card game! Randomness is baked in.

Winning the game will require you to manage the cards that you do draw and see what you can do with them.

Maybe Faith (above) could do really well with the Catastrophe shown above where you lose one point for each Blue trait.

Just change all the Blues to Red! Especially if you have the card that gives you a point for each Red trait you have.

Which reminds me to mention the Dominant traits.

Each colour has two Dominant traits, and you can only have two Dominant traits in your trait list.

They can’t be discarded from your trait list either, so they’re safe from nefarious other players.

They are very powerful (which is why you can only have two) but they come in a few different varieties.

Faith (above) is pretty cool.

Viral is pretty mean!

Though it can be selectively mean depending on how many players there are and what colour they’ve concentrated on.

Which does bring me to a point I want to emphasize, though personally I didn’t have a problem with it.

For a family-weight game, there are a fair amount of “take that” cards.

There are cards that let you steal traits from other players, or maybe play a card into an opponent’s trait pile (such trait has negative points, of course).

You can even steal the trait they were just about to play!

For a family game, that does seem a little much at times.

Little Joey might start crying if you hit him with these cards too often.

We didn’t mind it, of course. We loved it!

But it’s something to be aware of when breaking it out with the kids.

The game is extremely quick, and quick to teach. For the first time in I don’t remember when, the playing time on the box almost overestimates how long the game takes to play.

The box says 20-45 minutes. All but our first game took 20 minutes almost exactly.

There aren’t a lot of hefty decisions to make so turns are pretty rote. While you have an overall plan of action (go for blue and red, maybe?), it will depend on the cards you draw.

This is not a game that you will use as a cornerstone of your game day.

But it’s good for what it is, a nice lunchtime diversion, or maybe something to break out before or after the main event.

It plays up to six players, which is a great bonus.

The artwork is super cute and some of the flavour text is hilarious as well. Kudos to whoever wrote those.

We laughed, and one of our players kept taking pictures of cards in his hand to share with his partner because they were so funny.

The subtitle of Doomlings is “A Delightful Card Game for the End of the World,” and I can’t disagree.

While it has its issues, it is a delightful game.

This review was written after 3 plays

(Thanks to Doomlings Inc for the review copy of the game)