It Takes a Village to Face the End of the World – Doomlings – Mokoko Village Bolster Pack Review

It’s another week, must be another Doomlings review!

They do seem to breed like rabbits, don’t they?

Sadly, this looks like the last one for a while.

Try not to cry too much.

Doomlings: Mokoko Village bolster pack is another 37-card (40 cards with the Catastrophe and two Age cards, but I’m talking cards added to the deck) pack that will enhance your Doomlings play.

It was just released in late 2025 and it’s just cards.

That’s it.

No new mechanics or anything like that, so the card bloat concern that I had in Castle Glass isn’t really there as much.

I mean, sure, you’re adding 37 more cards to an already really large deck, depending on how many expansions you use.

But that just means more opportunity for colour synergy!

Let’s take a look and see what I mean.

Since this is just a cards expansion, it can be used with pretty much any set of Doomlings cards. Yes, it will dilute the Castle Glass pack, or the sets that include different factions that feed off each other.

But you may be coming close enough with all of the different faction cards that you can just include this pack instead of the base set.

No! I’m serious! And you’re not excommunicating me.

Imaginary Ends has 64 new trait cards with four different factions (10 of which have all three of the other factions on them)

Shadow Puppets has those same factions with 37 new traits!

That’s already 100 cards!

Add Mokoko Village and you have the equivalent of just the base deck (or maybe even slightly more).

I mean, you still need the base game for all the rules and to have enough good Ages and Catastrophes.

You can’t just avoid it.

But you don’t need to include the traits if you want some multi-expansion goodness.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on deck-creation (Editor: Not that we asked).

How do the cards work?

Surprisingly enough, they have managed to come up with some new and unique abilities and combinations, even given all of the abilities through all of the expansions so far.

The Dominant cards are just very cool, and they’re all different.

Sundering is a great way to get rid of negative-value traits, as long as you either don’t mind getting rid of some positive stuff too or just make sure you don’t have any other traits of that colour.

That one is kind of irritating in that you have to remember to do it every turn, which is not something that often happens in Doomlings and thus can be hard to remember.

I think there may be only a few other cards that have this type of ability.

Ancestral is an excellent card that lets you discard your worst card at World’s End, and gives you points for each colour where you only have two traits.

(This doesn’t pair well with the Meaning of Life card where you get +3 for each complete set of different colour traits, which I had to do once).

Cairnwalker can really add to your score if you have a bunch of negatives, zeros and 1-value traits of the same colour.

In what I have to say is some of the most brilliant card-name synergy I’ve seen, Teeny (above) can combine with Tiny (from the base game) to become almost obscene (sorry, I don’t have a picture of Tiny though).

Tiny gives you 17 face value points, but you subtract a point for every trait in your trait pile (including it). Teeny triples the face value of all of your Dominants! (So only the 2 because you can only play 2 Dominants, but still).

That would be 51 frickin’ points! Minus your traits, but maybe you have 10 or 15?

That’s still huge!!!

Ok, maybe you do want to play this with the base game.

Anyway, let’s move on so I can calm down a bit.

The other cards also have some interesting effects.

Veiled lets you, effectively, play the top card of the discard pile for free (no action) and discard a trait from your trait pile (Nasty negatives!). But, if you’re pressed and have to play something, you can also discard a card from your trait pile and then just play it right back.

You can’t use the action again, but at least you still have it, and you also have another 1-point purple in your trait pile.

Looking at all four of these cards, I love the new discard options with some of them.

There are more ways to get rid of negatives!

Or, in Entwined’s case, you keep your asshole opponent from stealing your really great card.

Sure, you don’t have it anymore, but neither do they.

It’s good there are new ways to discard traits, because there are some weird new negative value ones.

Weird, but in a good way!

Maybe you might want to actually play these to your own trait pile instead of to somebody else’s.

All five of these have a beneficial effect when they’re discarded from your trait pile, and have a cool action when you play them!

Rejected lets you play another trait.

Then, when you discard it from your trait pile, you get to increase your Gene Pool by one.

It boggles the mind!

Shunned not only gets you points if it’s your only purple (despite it’s negative face value), it also lets you play two purple traits if it’s ever discarded from your trait pile.

So you can prepare yourself and then get rid of that sucker.

Then you have some neat 0-value cards who will never score for you anyway.

That’s because they are discarded at World’s End.

They have a really nice action when you play them, but at World’s End, they get discarded.

No loss, really, unless you have something that wants that colour of card in your pile.

However, there are also some other new cards, one of which would love you to have all four of these in your trait pile.

Yes, Misfortune gets you 2 points for each card discarded during the final catastrophe.

That would be 8 points if you had all four of those!

Not to mention any traits that are discarded due to the final catastrophe itself.

Speaking of…

Yes, there is one catastrophe and two new ages in this bolster pack.

Surprisingly, the catastrophe doesn’t have you discard anything from your trait pile, just from your hand.

I think that’s a missed opportunity for more synergy, but I is not an English major or a game designer.

Overall, I love the different combinations and new trait actions and effects that are included in Mokoko Village.

Even with all of these cards, they’ve managed to bring up some new ones that work well together but also work well with other cards so deck bloat is not as much of an issue.

For once I’m not going to criticize for that reason!

I mean, definitely don’t play with every expansion under the sun.

Duh.

But otherwise, Mokoko Village fits in nicely with almost any set of Doomlings cards that you want to play with.

Is it a necessary expansion?

No, of course not.

Is it a fun and cool expansion to have?

Yes, yes it is.

(This review was written after two plays with this bolster pack, though since it is a minimal expansion, that is probably enough)

Many thanks to Doomlings LLC for the review copy of this bolster pack!