Hecatomb

Overall score:

I was genuinely surprised at how much I liked Hecatomb. The general themes of horror and despair are, of course, among my favorites, but I was still quite disappointed with all of the early previews and coverage the game received. The basic rules are, in typical Wizards of the Coast style, essentially just another variation of Magic, and the transparent pentagonal cards really felt like a desperate gimmick. Once I actually played it, though, and the rules and the card interactions started to make themselves clear, I was completely hooked. It is not a perfect game, but it is a very cool one, and a very fun one, and I look forward to seeing where they take it in the future.

The first thing you will notice about the game—and, really, its primary feature—are the cards themselves. Rather than the typical cardboard rectangles we expect in a CCG, these cards are pentagons, and made of a thin, clear plastic. The card’s name and picture are printed in the center, but the strength and abilities of each creature (or minion, as they are called) are printed in a strip along one of the five edges. A minion by itself can’t do anything, so if you want to attack or block you have to combine it with another minion to form a super-creature called an abomination. This is as simple as playing the new card on top of the old card—the new name and picture cover up the old one, but the old strength and abilities are still visible through the transparent edge of the new card. Your new abomination now has the combined strength and abilities of both cards, and is ready to go out and do battle in your name. Abominations can be stacked up to five minions deep, one for each side of the pentagon, and coming up with new and potent combinations is a lot of fun.

To add even more depth to the idea, each minion is from one of four “dooms,” completely analogous to the colors in Magic , and how you stack them can have a big impact on the course of the game. Most minions have a conditional ability that triggers when they come into play, but only if you play them on top of another minion of the right color. For example, let’s say you have the Bringer of Sacrifice minion in your hand—a little guy from the gray doom (Corruption). If you play him on another gray minion, his conditional ability triggers and you gain one soul—I’ll explain why that’s good in a minute. If you play him on a minion of any other color, you still get to use him as a creature but he doesn’t give you anything when he comes into play. Other minions want to be played on cards of different colors, encouraging multi-color decks, such as the Smothering Curtains—a blue minion (Deceit) that lets you bring a dead minion back to life if you play it on top of a green minion (Greed). Some conditional abilities are even bad: the Ruin Sifter is red (Destruction), but if you play him on another red minion he kills one of your other minions in play.

The concept of building abominations, and mixing and matching colors to get the right triggers, is the heart of the game, but there are still a handful of other things you can do. Relics and Gods are two different types of “enchantments”—cards that, like enchantments in Magic, sit off to the side and alter the game state in some ongoing way. There are also a number of Fate cards that have a one-time effect, though most of them (at least in the base set) are still related to creature combat in some way.

It should be noted at this point that the conceit of pentagonal cards does have some definite downsides. It is all but impossible to tell, at a glance, which abominations are tapped and which aren’t, and the mana sources are nearly as bad. The cards are hard to shuffle and annoying to store and transport, simply because they don’t fit naturally into any existing deck box or card carrier. On the other hand, they are a little more sturdy and resilient than typical cardboard cards, and the possibilities opened by their transparency might just be worth the trouble.

While stacking minions may be the flashiest of the game’s mechanics, the most profound in terms of gameplay is that of reaping souls. The winner is the first player to reap 20 souls, which you do by attacking with your abominations. This may seem like a mimic of Magic’s “deal 20 damage to kill a player” mechanic, but in practice it is almost the opposite: you are not trying to knock somebody down so much as build yourself up. Each player starts the game with five souls, and gains a new one at the beginning of their turn. This puts the game on a stiff clock, because even if you don’t do anything at all, somebody’s going to win in 15 turns. When you attack with your abominations, any that are not blocked slip through and reap souls from the defender—typically two or three—and give them to you. This is not a simple loss of life points, but an actual trade: the defender loses two souls and you gain them. In this way it is always quite clear who is ahead, and the game becomes a tense battle of gaining and keeping souls. This trading system is also a nice way of helping stragglers to catch up, because the relative numbers of souls become more important than the actual numbers—reaping two souls is really like reaping four, because you go up at the same time your opponent goes down.

Thus far I have talked a lot about the mechanics of the game, with very little talk about the flavor. This is because the flavor, while intriguing, is poorly implemented. The premise of the game is ambitious: each player is an “endbringer,” a powerful being bent on bringing about the end of the world. It is never clear precisely what an endbringer is: a dark god, a horseman of the apocalypse, a cultist, a wizard, a demon, or something else. You’re just a generic endbringer, and how or why you are able to marshal these forces of doom is left entirely vague. Most of our test games were played with almost complete disregard to the background and story—despite the game’s vocabulary, you never really feel like you’re crafting abominations or reaping souls or getting anywhere near the end of the world.

Another big glitch in the game’s flavor is the minion-stacking system itself: each minion is given a solid identity, including a name, a very evocative picture, and some pretty cool flavor text, but that identity is thoroughly useless in game terms because a single minion is helpless and useless. You may be able to summon Yophaaqua the demon, but he won’t do you any good unless you graft him onto something else, at which point he ceases to be Yophaaqua and becomes an undefined amalgam. The minions represent all kinds of cool monsters, including demons and mutants and possessed lawnmowers and other neat stuff, but for all intents and purposes those monsters are not actually part of the game—you can draw them and play them, but you can’t do anything with them until you turn them into something else. This is part of why we ignored the game’s lore and flavor—by the time the cards were important, their lore didn’t really matter anymore.

Perhaps a greater problem is that the game feels small—you never get the sense that anything you’re doing is going to bring about, or even accelerate, the end of the world. The need to combine minions in order to make them useful usually means that you don’t have a very big army at your command—three or four abominations tops—and it’s very hard to believe that you can end the entire world by reaping a paltry 20 souls. The fact that you can summon Cthulhu only makes this sense of scale seem like a worse fit.

It pains me to gripe about the flavor so much, because, when you take the time to notice it, the flavor is actually very good—it’s just the game’s fault for not using it well. The art is a blend of several different styles, all of them quite spooky and cool. Some of the art is clear and concise, some is nightmarish and half-seen, and some is darkly cartoonish. The names of the minions are more clever than they often need to be, with a lot of puns (a possessed elevator called a Hellevator; a crazed self-mutilator called a Scartist) and a lot of straightforward horror (“Moloch, Eater of Children”). The names of the Fate cards are even more fun, with such gems as Meddling Kids, Midnight Snack, and Surrounded By Idiots! Even the flavor text is great—the Hellevator says “In case of possession, please use stairs.” You can tell that the flavor team put a lot of work into this game, and had a lot of fun doing it; their zeal for the macabre comes across loud and clear. Which, of course, only makes it sadder that the flavor ended up being so peripheral to the actual game.

Overall, the good news is that Hecatomb is very playable and fun, and much stronger in its base set than most new CCGs. The bad news is, the cool gameplay and the cool flavor exist in different universes, and often work against each other to the detriment of the game. It’s worth playing at least once, though, and if you have a taste for horror and a love for CCGs that first game just might get you hooked.

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Written by Fellfrosch on October 29th, 2005