1490 Doom makes miniature gaming accessible

There are very few games that center themselves on throwing your opponent from a great height to their death (and, maybe more importantly, to their loss of the game). The feeling that gamers have been chasing since the cinematic masterpiece that is Cliffhanger has finally found its ultimate expression in 1490 Doom, a dark fantasy miniature game that focuses on skirmishes instead of grand battles and ruined cities instead of the dead void or an epic fantasy cavalry field.

Within miniature wargaming, Warhammer reigns at the top of the list. If you’re real cool you might know about Bolt Action, but the vast majority of people who show interest in little plastic figurines are going to either encounter space marines or fantastical Nurgle cultists. Both Age of Sigmar and 40,000, the major Games Workshop games, are very neat, but they are also a big commitment—you need an army. Their smaller, more tactical games like Warcry and Kill Team have a level of fiddly rules knowledge required for them that make them lightly hostile for even the interested player. I just want to paint some little guys and get them fighting, a new player might be thinking.

Notably, unlike some other miniatures games, it’s simple to get rolling with 1490 Doom. Buy the rulebook, follow it step-by-step, and you’re on your way. This matters a lot because the supply hurdle (how many little guys you have) and the rules hurdle (how much little guy knowledge you can remember) are a huge block to getting people to play games like this. 1490 Doom asks players to prepare exactly three miniatures so that they can create a Doom Company that fights against another player’s Doom Company for control of a round, two-foot-diameter board. Like many miniature games, coming up with the terrain is something you need to figure out yourself, but a two-foot circle is relatively easy to source; the worst case scenario is that you can use some boxes and bottles that were destined for the recycling bin to make your play area. The most important part about that board is that it has some vertical levels for Doom Companies to scramble onto. They are trying to get to the top before the other team does; if they don’t, they die to a mysterious fog that is eternally rising up from the ground and destroying the whole world. Avoiding getting your Doom Company destroyed is a key concern in this post-apocalyptic game.

These are humble pleasures, and it’s notable that 1490 Doom plays in the realm of fast (most games take about 20 minutes), low-weight (you only need three models), and simple (there are very clear character sheets for your three models). This means that any friend or interested party who wants to engage with 1490 Doom only needs to measure movement and read a character sheet in order to have an intense, committed battle for about 20 minutes. This is lightning-fast, even for a skirmish game, and it allows players to very quickly progress from the basic movement and attacking of 1490 Doom to the more complicated features like using a grappling hook and denying opponents opportunities for movement and area control.

Learning these ideas about movement and control are very important because, unlike the vast majority of games that exist, 1490 Doom is mostly about climbing higher than your opponent. It’s about slowing them down and speeding yourself up; it’s about figuring out how to push them off a ledge to their death while racing to climb a ladder. You’re also vying for points; a standard game contains seven rounds, and players with the highest score at the end of that wins. You get points by climbing higher than your opponent, keeping your models from being killed, and opening resource caches. In other words, you win by surviving, and if the points are tied at the end you simply fight to the death to see which Doom Company comes out alive. And being alive is a kind of victory.

What takes the game over the top is that it is pretty specifically geared toward getting you, the player, to engage in some creation yourself. There are official 3D printable miniatures for the game, but it seems like the vast majority of players will source their own miniatures by either crafting them or grabbing what they like from other games. This creates a strong baseline for creativity, and I immediately felt provoked to get my hands dirty with some glue, paint, and plastic to have the best experience I could with 1490 Doom. In fact, I played the game one single time before deciding that I needed to make a custom game board for it, creating a 18-inch stone-and-wood tower in the middle of a wooden tabletop that I found at Home Depot. I customized my three miniatures for this tower, thinking of them as its defenders, giving them shovels and lanterns to show that they were not soldiers but rather simple farmers who had found a final bastion. This experience of creation and fiction craft is just as important to me as any actual gameplay experience, and 1490 Doom prompting players to construct specific things to make the gameplay experience complete is crucial to the whole package.

The dark fantasy packaging and the ease of understanding 1490 Doom make it a compelling entry into the miniature wargaming hobby. And if you want to do some solo play, you can get a campaign book like The Fall Of Rothenburg. It might even guide you towards the bigger world of indie skirmish games, like Kill Sample Process, Forbidden Psalm, and the excellent upcoming diorama skirmish game Necropolis (which I’ve been playing in work-in-progress form for a while now). It’s good that these other games exist, because it’s hard to determine if most people will stay with 1490 Doom for a long time; I did begin to yearn for more complexity after a few games. It’s the perfect game for the miniature-curious, though, and the thrill of outmaneuvering someone on a thin bridge between towers that you built with popsicle sticks is a rare experience.

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