kungpao

Doomtown is the best strategy board game I have ever played. Although it is super complicated for beginners, if we would spend time on patiently learning how to play the game, it would be super enjoyable. Certainly, it involves with a lot of actions, such as building, attacking, gambling, earning, defending, moving, controlling, shopping and so on. There are many things on the cards and there are also a bunch of variety players could choose to play depending on how well the players know about the game. On the card, there are suits and numbers just like normal poker, but each suit represents different things, spades are dudes, hearts are equipment, diamonds are deeds, and clubs are events. The number (blue color) on the middle of deed card indicates how many control points it has; the bottom left number indicates how much it costs you to bring it to the play; the bottom right number indicates how much extra coins/ghost rocks you get in each turn. The number on the middle of dude card indicates how many influence points it ha and it used to help to win the game; the number on the bullet helps players to win a shootout; the number on the bottom right indicates how much it costs player to keep the dude in upkeep phase.

Unlike the most of other board/card games, in Doomtown, players need to move through four phases in order: Gambling, Upkeep, High Noon and Sundown. If you think that is a lot and it might take you forever to finish the game, you are wrong because in the Sundown phase we are supposed to determine the victory, if no one wins, then a new day starts. Since this is a board game or a card game, the most important factor that determines how powerful you are is how you do to your deckbuilding. There are a ton of cards come with this game, in other words, there are a ton of ways to building your own decks. For instance, you will need to have ranch cards like “Blake Ranch” in your deck so that “Max Baine” could utilize his ability.

I found it so interesting to do the gambling in gambling phase. Just like how we gamble when we play poker, there are different sets of poker hands to determine who wins the game. However, it is kind of weird that the rule is that whoever has the lowest hand wins the gambling. Besides, there are so-called cheating hands where one that has two or more cards with the exact same suit and value. You will have to use cheating resolution abilities either from your hand or from an action card, otherwise you lose the gambling round.

I would say Doomtown contains 80% of player’s strategy and 20% of luck. The 80% involves with how well you know about your deck that you build, what kind of strategy is the deck for (like basically attacking, depending or building, etc.) Because each dude or deed card has its own cost, to win the game you also need to make sure you have enough money/ghost rocks to get them into play and keep them as needed. Some cards might cost 0 ghost rock, but have no ability it just used to fill your board with a lot of dudes to psychologically scare your opponents. It’s almost zero possibility where players would have same strategies with same cards. So, before you play the game, you need to be sure what you will be doing. I say 20% of luck is because you don’t know what cards you would draw from the deck, in most cases from my experience with playing this game, you will not be able to draw the exact card you want, that is why you need to use your strategy to move your turns. The game could be going very fast if players are doing a lot of attacking actions, and it could also be going very slow if players would like to wait for attacking from their opponents and do the counterattack. So, once again, everything is pretty much about strategy and what cards you have in your deck. I believe that a more powerful deck of cards would bring more fun to the player.