It’s the end of the world, and it’s up to you to create an uncanny race of weird traits capable of surviving. What that really means is playing the best cards, stealing your opponent’s cards, and generally annoying your friends.l
Doomlings is a very easy-to-pick-up and quick family game that always plays out differently. You can find my review for the base game and the Overlush expansion here. This review is for the latest expansion, The Legends of Enderas. This expansion is what’s called a variety expansion; it contains five different mini-expansions in the box and is full of wacky cards and effects.
What’s In the Box?
This expansion is the kind of expansion you want for a game like Domlings. It’s just more stuff. Apart from the Treasures, everything can just be chucked in with the main game with very little rules overhead or new mechanics to wrap your brain around.
The expansion comes with 120 new cards split between The Dinolings, Mythlings, Techlings, Fuzelings and Treasures. Adding a lot of variety and new strategies to the Doomligs base game. The expansion also adds new Eras and Catastrophies, which is always nice.
The Setup
The setup for Legends of Enderas is exactly the same as base Doomlings apart from the Treasures. Which I don’t recommend if it’s anyone’s first foray into the world of Doomlings. Shuffle the trait deck, create the eras deck and deal 5 trait cards to each player. Give everyone a Gene Pool card set to 5 and you’re just about ready to go.
The Treasure Deck
The Treasure deck is a small deck of ‘player powers’, so to speak. You can either deal one to each player at the start, in which case you always draw at the end of your turn if you have less than 2 in your possession or hand out 3 at the start of the game and you must make them last, choosing the right time to play them gives you massive combo possibilities and game changing effects.
Turns
As always, players go round in circles, playing traits from their hands and trying to get the best score possible. What makes Doomlings though, is the sheer amount of variation in the cards, how they work together and the combos and strategies you can nurture.
New Cards and Possibilities
I have a few Doomlings sets and this one is by far the weirdest and most wacky. The Treasures give you a one-shot to draw cards, play free cards or alter the game state whenever you need to. There are a few different types which can be used at different times but they really open up your options and broaden the tactical feeling of the game.
The Mythlings cast weird abilities when discarded from your hand and can cause a lot of disruption and chaos. They even function when stabilising, meaning you can save them, then discard them if you’re over your gene pool size and garner some weird and wonderful benefit. It’s a win-win these these fellows.
Next up is the Techlings, bringing innovation and Attachments with them. They normally attach to other traits, increasing their score, power or ability. Be very careful though, because if someone steals the host trait, the attachment goes with it. Bye bye Bionic Leg, you were loved! The Dinolings, which are as fierce and toothy as you would imagine, can score big points, allow you to dig through the discard pile and are fierce. Just be wary, they, along with other cards in this set, can have self-damaging abilities or effects that are less than ideal on them.
Lastly, we have the Fuzelings, these are multifunctional traits that are either a blend of colours, which gives you increased scoring opportunities or a mix of other types of cards. Like a Dino- Tech card or some other multi-tool of a trait. A well-placed Fuzelings really can knit together your tableau and tip the scales of the game in your favour
Components
As with the base game, The Legends of Enderas is just a pile of cards. However, again, as with the base game, the artwork, card design and quirkiness to the whole thing make it shine. The traits are beautifully drawn and are very funny to read and play with, even the small flavour text has me giggling at times.
The cards are bright, well-printed and very easy to read. The expansion even comes with one holofoil and that is a nice touch. The more holofoils in my collection the better. While the component amount is small and only made up of cards, they are of good quality and well- produced.
Final Thoughts
If you like Doomlings, The Legends of Enderas is stellar. It adds so much replayability and choice to a game already chock-full of it. The 5 mini-expansions included give you a lot of variety and the Treasure deck does add something truly different to the Doomlings’ gameplay experience. It’s an expansion that adds a lot with very little and does not require much thought. Like I said, you can chuck it all in, apart from the Treasures, even for new players. I did today and it went over beautifully.
However, if you don’t like Doomlings, I do not think this expansion will do anything to change that. Let’s be honest though, if you don’t like Doomlings, why are you reading an expansion for Doomlings?
