A key stop on my Gen Con travels this year was to check out Modiphius' DOOM board game; we still don't yet know exactly when it'll come to Kickstarter, but I couldn't miss the chance to test it out in the (prototype) flesh. From the initial pitch, I expected Doom: Arena to be a quick playing, blunt, uncomplicated new board game, with as few rules and mechanics as possible. And, reader, that's exactly what this is. Sort of.
On my first glance at the prototype copy at Gen Con, I was a little cynical; there just didn't seem to be enough to it. A pleasing sideshow, but not a contender for our all time list of the best board games. After playing it some, and speaking to the designer at the show, however, I'm not so sure.
Leaving aside for a moment the gorgeous, nostalgia-fuel miniatures, let me briefly explain the main rules. It's a two player game, with one controlling a progressively more beweaponed Doomguy and the other directing an increasing number and variety of demons trying to eat him, guns and all.
There are three rounds of six turns each. Each turn, you'll make one move and one action with one of your minis (in my test game, 'act' literally just meant attack, though there are a set few, more powerful 'tempo' actions available from the midgame onwards).
The titular 'arena' for your gory melee is a simple, roughly 2 foot by 3 foot hex grid, laid out like a level from the classic DOOM FPS, with a few impassable obstacles, and acid channels that hurt you if you stand in them.
Each of the Doomguy's weapons (and the demons' attacks) comes with its own range template in hexes - your pistol shoots in a long, straight line; the shotgun in a shorter, broader cone, and so on - and when you attack, you always hit. You'll roll different damage dice depending on the attack, and apply the resulting damage (lower numbered dice for peashooters, higher for machine guns). And that's that.
In fact, that's more than that, because the win condition of the game isn't kills, it's damage: every point of damage done gains you a Blood point, whoever spills most blood in a round gets a 'keycard token', and the player with most keycard tokens at the end wins, making it a 'best of three' setup. It's appropriately, and quite endearingly, unsubtle.
The carefully limited action economy, however, transforms DOOM: Arena from what might've been an overly simplistic, no-frills skirmish wargame into (as its designer Ben Maunder describes it to me) "heavy metal chess". Your decision space per turn is tight and quick - but you quickly realize the meat of the game is as much in planning ahead, careful positioning, and controlling the board as it is in turn-to-turn tactical kablammos; especially if you're playing as the demons.
"Playing as the demons is almost like being a bit of a mastermind," Maunder tells me in our short interview at Modiphius' Gen Con booth. "Over the course of the game," he says, "you'll be selecting which demons you want to activate and when, and using that to basically capitalize on whatever mistakes the Doom guy makes.
"Your entire role is taking advantage of the situation."
Meanwhile - just like in the videogame - the Doomguy's job is to deal out as much damage as possible every turn, while dancing out of the way of as much incoming hellfire as he can. He'll also be spending 'arsenal tokens' to pick up bigger, nastier guns in between each of the game's three rounds, while, on the opposite side of the board, the demon player spends theirs on spawning in extra monsters, able to 'build' for either quantity (with swarms of Imps and Zombies) or quality (fewer, bigger baddies like Cacodemons and Cyberdemons).
This simple, aggressive gamefeel is entirely by design, Maunder tells me, and coming up with it was apparently "quite a quick and interesting process". He and the team still had to go through "a few different iterations" before settling on this one, though.
"We played about with a card game," he says. "At one point, we tried a more kind of dungeon crawling type of thing - and every single time it was like: 'no, that's not what DOOM is'."
In the end they distilled three core "tenets" of the videogame's essence, which formed the basis for the Arena board game.
"For DOOM, it's speed, violence, and escalation; those were the three things we needed to transfer over," Maunder explains.
"So it's a fast playing game that only ever rolls damage dice, and you're constantly growing what models and what guns you're using. So we've got speed, violence, and escalation - and you don't need to go any further."
There's a tiny bit more crunch than that, of course. You'll get three arsenal tokens at the end of each round, which can be spent right away on upgrades to escalate your power, or saved up to lay some serious smack down in the following round. The first time you deal damage each turn, every turn, gives you a 'tempo token' (the colorful Doomguy face tokens pictured below) - which can be spent on special tempo actions.
Some are cheap; others more expensive and devastating - for three tempo tokens, the Doomguy can fire off a single use 'B.F.G.' attack to do enormous damage (which means enormous blood points). There is, therefore, a bit more strategy to this than simply move, shoot, repeat.
Rounds last around 15 minutes, meaning a full game will take you 30-60 minutes all told. By way of variety of play, Maunder tells me "there are [also] free play modes that allow you to kind of dictate the length of your own game, to give people that kind of sandbox appeal". Fundamentally, though, it's a fast playing, disarmingly simple game, where the strategic meat comes from mastering a solid, simple game plan, skilful, deliberate movements, and situational awareness. You know, like DOOM.
Whether all this adds up to a tabletop experience that's genuinely gripping and replayable, or a flash in the pan that turns shallow and stale after a few games, we won't know until we get to review it in full. But my short preview leaves me optimistic, and not a little refreshed, by DOOM Arena's all bloodshed, no bullshit approach to the source material.
The exact crowdfunding launch date for DOOM Arena isn't finalized yet, but Modiphius founder Chris Birch tells me "it's an Autumn/Winter Kickstarter, so it'll be before Christmas". Both versions of the game - one flavored after classic DOOM, the other based on Id Software's 2025 medieval follow up DOOM: The Dark Ages - will crowdfund simultaneously, and play more or less the same, but with re-styled components (including the minis) and minor gameplay tweaks.
We don't have a final price yet, either, but Birch assures me that (like the studio's $50 Mass Effect board game, released last year) it'll be an affordable box that prioritizes getting the core game into folks' hands over providing hordes of extra miniatures. "The core boxes themselves are being designed so they can go to retail," he confirms; "They're not a giant $200 box."
For more coverage of the DOOM board game, stick to Wargamer in the coming weeks, as we'll have more details coming very soon! If you've got questions about the game, or just want to chat hype about it with us, come join the free Wargamer Discord community, where there have been no confirmed demonic incursions for at least three months!