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Assumptions. We all make them in life, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, I mean right now I’m assuming you’re here because you already own Doomlings, however apparently to assume makes an ass out of u and me, so let’s not do that. I’d not heard that saying until I was in my adulthood but as a child if I said I ‘thought’ something i.e. ‘I thought you’d played Doomlings?’, I was often met with the response of (please don your best Sheffield accent to read the following) ‘Aye, well you know what thought did don’t you? He followed a muck cart and thought it wor a weddin’ or ‘He wet bed and thought he wor sweatin’ same sentiment really.
Anyway, in Brief Doomlings is all about trying to score as many points as you can by playing the cute little Doomlings into your trait pile (tableau if you will) You’ll play over a series of rounds called ages, each age having its own effects for the round. Hidden within those ages are catastrophes, once you’ve uncovered three of those its game over. With various little tricks and abilities to affect scoring and players along the way as well as at the end, it’s a great friendly little game… about the end of the world. If you’ve not yet played it, you can check out a full review of Doomllings here by one of our lovely reviewers, she does waffle on at first though!
So how do you upgrade the apocalypse?
The Doomlings upgrade Box is actually five expansions handily packed into… erm… well a box! It contains what I would consider the first few expansions, they certainly feel like the next step up for the game to me. The five included are Dinolings, Mythlings, Techlings. Multi-color (not happy with that spelling, but we’ll go with what the box says) and The Meaning of Life. All in all there are 81 new cards, some are traits, some are eras and the meaning of life cards are something totally different entirely.
First up, Dinolings.
Dinolings is the first step to upgrading your core game. 16 new trait cards (one of which is a dominant) with various new abilities, a new age and a new catastrophe card. This pack adds a few more cards that activate extra points come the end of the world, but there is also two cards that relate to other Dinolings cards. Nothing too striking in this pack, but a good all-rounder to introduce more cards to the game
Next up Mythlings.
Mythlings are much like above with a similar number and spread of extra cards, however this is where things get interesting. A large chunk of these cards are to be played out of turn, in fact, more than half of the trait cards in this expansion fit this category. Many of these new traits are a little tricky, and you’ll need to read them carefully to make sure you don’t lose out and discard something you didn’t have too.
Middle for diddle, it’s the Techlings.
Again the Techlings has a similar spread of cards and new actions as the two packs I mentioned previously but now introduces a new mechanic. Within this pack some cards are ‘attachments’, this means they attach to other cards (host cards) already in trait piles. The attachments often let you do things like score extra points at game end, or use an action that’s already been played and this really notches the game up a level. Attachment cards are pretty much stuck to their hosts for the game, but there are a few rules about swapping or discarding a host etc. You’ll definitely want to keep the reference card on hand for when these situations occur.
Multi-color
… I’m still irked by that spelling, but back to the matter at hand the expansion. This is the smallest of the five expansions with just 8 cards, all of which are traits and seven of those have no effects what so ever! You may have guessed but the majority of these cards are multi-coloured (I’m not referencing the pack so I can spell it correctly here!) These little doomlings decided they wanted to be more than one colour and so they are, and it’s pretty fantastic! Aside from one new colourless trait which does have an end of the world effect, the rest are all effectless but they are two colours, one of them might even be all four colours. This means they count as all the colours featured on their border at the same time, this can be great for scoring extra points, however it can sometimes mean the cards are more vulnerable too. These cards also feature little symbols to aid colour blind players, which is a nice little touch especially as my other half is colour blind, sad that this hasn’t been featured on the base/other expansions though.
Finishing up we have The Meaning of Life
Seems very existential doesn’t it! The meaning of life is like none of the above expansions, it creates an entirely new element of the game with the 18 cards that come in this pack. These are hidden objective cards and they’ll be one for everyone, I like to think of them as my little side quest. Each card gives you something to aim for such as having a requisite amount of purple traits or even ending on the lowest score. Each will have two levels of points you can achieve, for instance The Dancer card gives you 12 extra points if you have the lowest score, but only 8 if you’re tied for the lowest score. The end of the game can really change in an instant with these.
Run wild and free, it is the end of the world after all!
The Doomlings upgrade box does exactly what it says on the tin… or box. It gently takes you through the first few expansions to help upgrade your game. Each one is easy enough to understand and integrate into the base game, but each one adds just that little bit more than the one that came before it. We started off tentatively with this upgrade by just introducing the dinolings, but as theres already a huge selection of cards in the base set we felt the new cards hardly came up. Consequently we threw caution to the wind and not only put all the expansions in, but also took out a chunk of the base game so we’d get more exposure to the new cards. Hey, don’t frown at me like that, it’s my game, I can do what I like… okay, okay, it’s my sons game but he wasn’t there so he’ll never know!
This made for a brilliantly bonkers game that changed even quicker than it normally did, I don’t know why I tried to plan ahead in this game, because it never works! Also top tip, read the cards properly, I was planning to use one card before it was stolen by my other half, turns out we’d both been reading it wrong and ended up doing ourselves out of points!
As standard with expansions, each card has a symbol in the corner denoting which expansion it belongs to which helps with re-setting the base game. The only set that doesn’t is the multi-color expansion, but they are mostly multi-coloured so easy enough to distinguish, that is all apart from the colourless trait, which annoyingly has no way to distinguish it as part of an expansion. In case you did what I did and just shuffled the cards into the base game without paying much attention, the card is ‘Free Will’ - you’re welcome!
The least stand out for me amongst the packs are the dinolings, but they are a necessary evolutionary step in taking the cards up a notch. For me, the favourite is the meaning of life pack, nothing like totalling your scores then blowing everyone else out of the water by revealing you’ve achieved your secret objective and earnt a cheeky extra 6 points!