Hideous Abomination

It’s aliiiiiiivvvveee! Following a tight Kickstarter campaign Hideous Abomination succeeded in the very final hour. Edinburgh based artist and board game designer Judson Cowan has flipped the 10,000 volt switch to bring this gruesome little tile laying gem into being. And it’s truly hideous, in all the right ways. (*evil doctor laugh*)

What’s That Coming Out Of The Deck? Is It A…

The aim of the game in Hideous Abomination is to construct a completed monster, an abomination, from an array of gruesome but brightly coloured limbs and bits – heads, arms, hands, feet and more. Awards and points are up for grabs for completing your abomination first, for colour variation, as well as number of noses, eyes, wings, bendy bits. The list goes on. The picture I’m trying to paint on this blood splashed canvas is that the possibilities are endless, and therein lies one of the game’s major strengths: with 190 different body parts, 9 doubles sided torsos and a number of different scoring criteria, no two games are ever the same.

Sure, the core mechanic is the same each time and it’s a relatively simple one but this is more than welcome. Not every game on my shelf has to be a rules heavy, brain buster, with layer upon layer upon layer of complexity.

Eyes Everywhere

It’s also worth noting that Hideous Abomination is not just a case of slapping down tiles to complete pretty monsters: you have to keep an all seeing eye on the potential rewards and on your opponent’s abomination as well as your own, you have to look out for tiles you might wish to steal from your opponent, keep a beady eye on which body parts you’d like to bolt down to avoid them being stolen and decide when to prolong the game or end it swiftly for your own benefit. Basically, you need to have at least 5 eyes. If you don’t, you don’t deserve the title of hideous. Basically, simplicity x depth = winner!

Wretched Sketches

Aesthetically, it’s a beast too. Beautiful hand drawn body parts are a joy to behold. As you pull them from a monstrous stack at the beginning of each round, either blind from the deck or from the spare parts buffet (3 face up cards available at the start of each round), they never fail to bring a smile as you turn over something you’ve not seen before. There are noses on knees and eyes on arms, body parts where no body part has any business being. And it’s great – aesthetically but also for the added depth when you are building a collection of noses or eyes, both in obvious places and far less obvious places.

Guts And Gore For All

Finally, there are alternate rules for younger players: simple rules where point scoring is simplified and very simple rules where all point scoring is removed and the winner is simply the first to complete their abomination. Having played a full game with my wife and a “very simple” game with my 6 year old, I enjoyed both just as much, albeit in very different ways. With my son, I was able to relax into it and just enjoy playing with him. I watched as he constructed cool monster, drinking in the look on his face when he gasped every single time a card more gruesome or funny (or both!) than the last crawled out of the deck.

Games in this very simple variant are quick but there is tonnes of room to stretch even more from the experience, even at the very simplest level. Once the game was over and I had stitched my monster to completion (he won, obviously), I was able to ask him “Whose monster has the most eyes/noses/teeth/horns”. Great for simple counting. And because the rules had been stripped right back and the games were quick, we started to invent our own victory criteria: if you win this round, you get all your opponent’s monster tiles. The person with the most tiles once the deck runs out wins. I spent about 45 minutes with him playing like this.

The game held his attention throughout and he was so keen to dive into it again and gain, round after round. The game was also designed with those that are affected by colourblindness in mind: each body part is coloured but is also textured in terms of how it is illustrated, meaning that those that cannot discern certain colours are not excluded. While this didn’t affect our game, the texture element added another discussion point with my young son and any game which has inclusivity at heart is more than welcome at any table.

Final thoughts

Overall, I think you can tell that I like Hideous Abomination. A lot. Having initially gotten into board gaming at the deep and complex end of things, I’m welcoming more and more straightforward gaming experiences into my collection. The (pus filled) sweet spot of simplicity and depth is very much achieved here.