Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein succeeds where Alien: Fate of the Nostromo fails. If you’ve ever wanted to be Peter Cushing in an olde skool Hammer Frankenstein flick, this is the game for you!
Unlike Alien, which shies away from its dark subject matter, Abomination really leans into it. We played an epic four-player game last Thursday and the general consensus was that the game was gloriously and apologetically “gross."
And that's the way it should be! Designer Dan Blanchett serves up a playable, macabre, step-by-step, “how to” manual on assembling and animating a dead body! That means you’ll find yourself robbing graves, visiting execution sites, harvesting flesh, blood, bones and organs, cheekily subbing in animal parts (!) and even murdering people for their tender bits! If you have an issue with pickling organs for sale or putting body parts on ice to prevent decomposition, then you may want to give this one a wide berth.
The game is insanely ambitious. You have to balance your scientist’s Humanity, Expertise and Reputation in order to harvest your optimal...um...materials, get your lab ship-shape and then try to animate every individual body parts with electricity. As if that wasn’t enough detail, Event Cards drawn at the start of every new round will constantly tweak the game play and some will even add in cool thematic story elements to shake things up.
If anything, the game is a bit too ambitious and could use some streamlining and focus. From a design standpoint, I’d just have players assemble the body pasts in a single stage and activate it in one fell swoop, awarding bonus victory points for speed and quality. Not only would this be a slicker gaming experience, its actually more in step with the theme.
Sadly, as it is out of the box, Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein is unnecessarily lumbering and takes waaaay too long to play. Our four player game went from 7 pm to 11:30. The game also commits the cardinal sin of including a “take that” elements, which usually boils down to forcing people to discard precious “building materials” just as they're on the cusp of creation.
As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, rolling dice to activate your individual body parts is incredibly annoying. With his uncanny ability to just dial up exactly what he needed at clutch times, Andrew eclipsed me by rolling well. Despite a deliberate effort to boost up my scientist’s Expertise and collect Research Cards designed to mitigate bad luck, I still ended up getting hosed by the fickle dice on several occasions.
By including numerous setback opportunities, luck-based mechanics which can stymie and infuriate and a rule set that makes the game feel like a bloated cadaver fished out from the Seine, Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein is its own worst enemy at times.
But between its amazing production values and full commitment to such grim subject matter, I'm still sorely temped to buy it! Just like the titular obsessed mad scientist, horror phreaks like myself will be hard pressed to resist the opportunity to play God, albeit in a very "gross" way.
Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein scores four pips outta six, with a massive tilt up towards the top of that castle's craggy tower, which, curiously, always seems to be getting struck with lightning!
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