We’re Doomed – A Panic-Causing Board Game

As much as I love board games, they do tend to go on for a while. That’s not always a bad thing, but sometimes you want to play a nice, quick, short board game. Something that is fun but cleans up nicely when it’s done. To put it another way, the gang and I take forever to finish any board game.

Thankfully, I bought my brother a gift for Christmas, and it’s just what we were looking for.

We’re Doomed!

We’re Doomed is a simple table top game that can support up to 10 players. As the name suggests, it’s the end of the world, and everyone is fighting for a seat on the escape vehicle, a rocket. But at the same time, you need to actually build the rocket. Because, you know, rockets don’t grow on trees. Players must balance obtaining Influence and spending resources towards the escape ship. While you can get away with having enough influence to escape, it’s also possible that the rocket might not even be able to take off.

Simple Gameplay

We’re Doomed is a very simple game. Each person represents a different type of society, from Democratic to Theocratic. On your turn, you can choose to grab resources or influence, or take an action against another player (e.g. stealing their resources). Once everyone has had their turn, everyone donates some of their resources to the escape rocket. The person who donates the most resources then gets to start the next round. But they must also take an Event Card.

Event cards come in black and white. White ones are revealed to all players, black cards are kept secret and used later on. These cards can do all sorts of strange things, like forcing someone to count to 60 out loud, banning the letter I and even changing the win conditions of the game! That being said, a lot of event cards are fourth-wall breakers, and apply to the people sitting around the table rather than our various corrupt governments. It’s still fun though.

At the end of the game, whoever has the most influence can get on the ship and escape. However, everyone needs to have donated at least 40 resources for the ship to take off. If you don’t have enough resources, good job, you’re all dead.

A race against time

The biggest surprise though is that you are on the clock. Everyone is. Each game of We’re Doomed comes with a 15 minute timer to the end of the world. When that timer runs out, you’d better hope you got on that rocket because otherwise, you’re doomed. The game even pushes you to go as fast as possible, and the instructions suggest you make annoying countdown time noises to anyone who is taking too long.

You’d also be surprised just how quickly time flies. 15 minutes seems like plenty of time to build both resources and influence. But between the 15 minutes and everyone’s event cards, that time really trickles away. It all trickles away much faster if the event cards work against you.

While We’re Doomed is a wonderfully quick little game, it does make me think about the end of the world. Hopefully, We’re Doomed won’t be how we end up facing the apocalypse. But with reality, who knows any more?