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Doomlings is a very fun card game that has been a big favourite within my family for a while now. I remember buying the base game just to have something to play while being away for a few days with my wife and my son but it turned out to be much more fun that I expected. Considering how much we loved this game and how much we played with the base game, it seemed quite obvious to start looking to a way to bring more variety and fun to this game and that's where Zatu stepped in providing me the perfect solution: the “Imaginary Ends Expansion” expansion box. Let me explain why Imaginary Ends is the best Doomlings expansion so far.
In the beginning, there were only Doomlings
At first glance, Doomlings is a strategic card game with some engine and tableau building elements.
Set in a distant planet, the aim of the game is to create the species of Doomlings with the highest chances to survive by playing one new trait each turn. Unfortunately the competition to survive is very fierce among the Doomlings and the environment is quite harsh. Most important, there is not much time left as the world is set to suffer a few catastrophes before a massive cataclysm will end all life on the planet (and the game). As you may imagine, the objective of the game is to score the most points by the time the world ends.
In order to score points, each player can play one Trait card from their end to make their Doomlings’ species more successful. The traits are divided in 6 different colours, each of them with their own peculiarities and strength. Depending on your choices, your Doomlings may be more adaptable or more resilient, but you can also play more mischievous traits in an effort to slow down your opponents. In fact, a large amount of Traits have special abilities that can increase your scores or lower your opponents' one. Other traits have special bonuses, including some that will trigger only at the end of the Game. With a whole host of cards in the starting deck, the amount of possible combinations is massive and each player has to find the best way to use their own cards in order to win. A more in depth review of the base game can be found here.
New Doomlings and Expansion content
Imaginary ends includes a total of 127 new cards that almost double the size of the game considering the base game includes 167 cards. I will discuss later how to best integrate these cards in your games but for now I would like to point out that this expansion includes actually 5 different sets.
The first set introduces the “Deeplings”, a new type of Doomlings that can live in the shadowy depths of the unknown. Their traits allow them to “suppress” other traits creating a new mechanics and a new type of strategy. The suppressed traits, in fact, always score 1 point disregarding their face value and they do not count in the total of the player traits.
The next type of Doomlings we discover in this expansion are the “Moonlings”, alien creatures that allow a player to give unwanted cards to opponents and that rewards the players with lower Gene Pool. This mechanics can allow a player to turn the negative effects of the catastrophes to their advantage giving them more opportunity to score higher points.
The “Glitterlings” are the happiest, sweetest, cuddliest and funniest Doomlings in this expansions. Glitterlings will always see the glass completely full, pink and sparkling and they can provide a
very bright future to any player assuming they take their chance (and succeed....).
All the traits of three type of Doomlings above merge into the Fuzelings, generating a chaotic mix of Deeplings, Moonlings, and Glitterlings with the potential of high rewards for the players. At the same time, the combination of the characteristics of three Doomlings types can result in very unexpected effects that can instead damage the player.
The last of the five expansions included in Imaginary Ends is Magical Merchants. This expansion is quite different from the previous 4 as it introduces a few new traits (11 cards) but also a new type of card: the Trinket card (40 in total). The new Merchant ages are added to the setup superseding 2 of the 3 ages usually picked for each stack. During their turn, Players can obtain a random Trinket if they do not have any face-up. Each Trinket comes with a power that is always active when the Trinket is face up and they can be pocketed by fulfilling a condition on the card. Once pocketed the Trinket is placed face down and their value is added to the final scope. The tricky part is that players can get a new Trinket every time they pocket their previous one but some of them may have a great ability the player may not want to lose. In other cases, the ability of the Trinket may impact negatively a player strategy thus pocketing them is imperative for that Player.
How to integrate this Expansion Pack into your game?
Technically speaking, Doomlings is a CCG (Collectible Card Game) and therefore you can play with any set and subset of the game in whatever way you prefer. In this sense, incorporating Imaginary Ends into your games is pretty straightforward as you just need to add any or all the sets included in this expansions to the cards of your core game and then start playing.
The main issues in using all cards together is that your Trait deck will become very very large and difficult to shuffle between games. In addition, you will dilute a lot some of the new traits making a bit more difficult to pull out powerful combos. Last but not least, the Magical Merchants expansion feels completely different from the standard game and requires the players to use only the catastrophe cards from this expansions.
Personally, I found that a much better approach is to consider the Magical Merchants as a separate expansion and to add either this one or the other four type expansion to your games but never all five together. The other four main expansions are quite coherent and both the traits and the catastrophes they add to the game feel very coherent thus having all together in your decks will just add more variety without changing substantially the gameplay. A good approach may be to remove some cards at random to match the number of Fuzelings, Deeplings, Moonlings, and Glitterlings cards you add to limit the size of the Trait deck and to make sure you can strategize a bit more with the new cards. Although in theory you can also play using only with the cards from the expansions, I would not recommend as it feels like the new cards have been designed to complement and improve the standard gameplay, not to be an alternative to the core game.
A very important aspect to know when you start playing with the expansion is that all the cards from each set have their unique symbol on the right side of the cards and some of them also have icons on them so separating the cards between games should be pretty simple. This also helps in terms of storage as the Imaginary Ends box is not very great to keep your cards in particular if you sleeved them. Storing all expansions together in the standard or deluxe base box is instead feasible although I would love to have a big box with spacers for all the expansions....
How much Fun this Expansion Packs?
If you have played the core game and you liked it (as I do), you will find the new cards and game mechanics from Imaginary Ends to be very enjoyable. All the five new sub-sets introduce new cards and some of them also a couple of new mechanics that all contribute to improve the overall game. The four main ones contribute to create more variety, scoring possibility and very funny player interactions. In my opinion, the original game becomes much better when all the new four expansions are added together.
At the same time, the fifth expansion, Magical Merchants, re-invents the game by adding a different type of card and a new way to score points and gaining abilities. In fact, the Trinket cards are so different from all other cards that you may feel you are playing a new game. I found the shift in mindset and focus needed to play this expansion a very welcome variation and I quite love playing this new version of a very enjoyable game.
Overall, I think the Imaginary Ends is a very enjoyable expansion that adds both variety and fun to the base game. With respect to Overlush, the previous expansion released in 2023, I also like the fact that the set of cards in Imaginary Ends is fixed and there are no mystery packs with random pulls. I am a big fan of TCGs and to open Booster packs but I quite like that this expansion is back to a more standard CGC design.
The only (minor) negative aspect of this expansion is the storage box. Once all packs of cards opened, I didn't like the idea of storing my cards back in the original plastic tray as I felt they may get damaged by the way the tray is designed. In addition, using the original box was not even an option once I sleeved all the cards as the tray was designed only considering the non-sleeved cards. To be fair, I was not surprised as storing the cards once sleeved has been a challenge with all the Doomlings set as it seems the designer assumed people will never sleeve their cards.... I know is not a big issue for many and it is not a massive negative, but as a gamer I would really appreciate to see a collector box with enough space for all the expansions... sleeved.
That concludes our thoughts on Doomlings, Imaginary Ends expansion. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames.