Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve become a grouchy old man or if some things really are this vacuous. Probably the former.

Doomlings occupies its own corner of the tabletop hobby. It’s a corner I don’t often step into. Boxes covered with cutesy but off-putting caricatures, possibly with foil highlights that glint like neon signs announcing the inclusion of cable TV at that one motel on the edge of town that’s always clashing with the health department. Artwork either drawn by or drawn in imitation of Matthew Inman, the guy who writes The Oatmeal and inflicted Exploding Kittens and its offspring on the world. These are the board games that board game stores are required by law to carry. They sell them to your grandmother when she wanders over, befoiled box in hand, to proudly announce that her grandchildren love board games. This one caught her eye, some part of her mammalian cortex screaming in recognition at the box’s combination of glinting eyes, thirsty smiles, and bulging forms. In caveman times, she would have recognized the signal for alarm, a warning that the creature hunched before her wasn’t quite right, needed to be purged with fire for the good of the tribe. Instead, she will present it to you for your birthday. You will thank her, for you are a good person who loves your grandmother, play it once, and then relegate it to the back of the closet. That’s as close as we get to burning bloodsucking imposters anymore.

It just so happens that Doomlings, designed and illustrated by Justus Meyer rather than Matthew Inman, is possibly the least cynical, or at least the most playable, of that deeply unpleasant category of board game.

Traits. A gene pool. It’s about evolution, y’know.

The world is ending. The comet’s on the way down, the sun is flaring, the nanomachines are already turning out paperclips. Doomlings writes the fate of its orb-beings in stone from its very first moment. It’s like whistling past the graveyard. Then urinating on the sidewalk because your teenage brain thinks it’s funny. Three catastrophes are shuffled into a deck of age cards; when the last one is drawn, the world has ended and the best-adapted being wins the whole thing. While still perishing beneath a crush of ice or wall of fire, of course. Ah. Nihilism.

There are plenty of board games about evolution. Some of them are excellent. Doomlings takes the same basic formula — that evolved life emerges from a jumble of random mutations and competing niches — and rather than marveling at its improbability, the utter miracle that anything animate exists at all, that there are green things drinking the sun and megafauna composed of colonies of trillions of cooperating organisms, that somewhere in the process a slab of meat woke up and began to regard the beauty around it with wonder and awe, Doomlings takes that and turns it into a ripped fart.

No offense to farts. Farts can be funny. Doomlings tries very hard to be funny. It stretches and contorts. It imitates and invokes. The most common card type, traits, with which players slowly assemble the genetic makeup of their creatures, all come with a joke, but that’s like saying finding a bug in your salad qualifies as protein. Blubber: “It’s protective fat, thank you very much.” Appealing: “Orange you glad?” Venomous: “My bite is worse than my bark.” Bark: “Woof.” Hyper-Intelligence: “E=mc stop staring at my head.” It’s the level of humor an adolescent sometimes exhibits when belting out a non-sequitur and then offering commentary on how bad it was. “Dog biscuits. Raaaandoooom.”

In its better moments, Doomlings codifies its jokes into card effects. The trait for Late appears after you’ve stabilized, the game’s term for drawing back up to your hand limit after playing a card. Becoming a Prepper means choosing which of those three concluding catastrophes will trigger its end-game effect. The game’s one true belter, the age card announcing the appearance of The Messiah, reverses the play order. You know, so that the first is last and the last is first. Now that’s a joke.

More often, there’s scant connection between a card’s stated function and the perk it offers to the player. These cards are worth points and correspond to a color, but do little else, regardless of the wide-open design spaces they represent. Gills? Fine Motor Skills? Migration? Fear? Fangs? Antlers? Nothing. Other cards increase your gene pool — your hand limit — or move cards between players’ trait piles. Certain powerful traits are “dominant.” These are marked by a star and, in the game’s one concession to balance, only two of them can be placed in any given tableau. It’s a mixed decision. On the one hand, it shows that Doomlings was created with at least some cognizance that it’s largely determined by chance and that players would probably prefer at least some semblance of control, no matter how marginal. On the other, it prevents any tableau from becoming, well, interesting. For a wacky take-that game where anything is possible, Doomlings is oddly muted when it comes to the wacky, the take-that, or how far it’s willing to stretch the possibilities.

Not every joke is bad.

That, ultimately, is the reason Doomlings fails. It’s boring. Everything else is a compounding problem. The humor? Pancake flat, but easily ignored. The art? Doomlings once glanced in the direction of The Oatmeal and decided to replicate it in an even more unappealing manner, but whatever. The divorce between the cards that matter and those that don’t? That’s life, kid.

Instead, Doomlings doesn’t even embrace the zaniness it so loudly espouses. Turns are simple: you play a card. Once per round, one of those age cards is flipped to maybe modify the rules. Along the way, hands are large enough — and they’re altered or swapped so often — that it’s necessary to peruse what you’re holding. Quite a few cards allow you to copy or steal another player’s trait. These pauses are rarely long (because who cares?), but they arrive with such incessant rapidity that the game still doesn’t clip along. For all that, traits tend to be dull. Adjustments to your hand size, a stolen trait, a card worth negative points sabotaged into an opposing tableau. The best of them let you play an additional card. Tedious but effective. Whenever a catastrophe appears, the first player is shifted. Why? What does this serve other than to interject another piece of misplaced balance, another intangible detail to keep track of? Does this game want to be an airy experience that lets friends while away half an hour or an actual game that people play because there’s anything there? It’s all so boilerplate that it makes rolled steel look like an elevation map.

Contrast that flatness with other evolutionary exemplars like Evolution, Oceans, or the much heftier Bios:Mesofauna. These games revel in the diversity and beauty of nature, while also wholly embracing its horror and weirdness. They’re all heavier games, but in the first two cases not by all that much. And Oceans in particular demonstrates better comedic chops simply by expressing the stickiness of nature as a positive. Ever called your wife a Mucus Cocoon? Ever called her that and it was a compliment? That’s Oceans for you.

For all of that, I mean it when I say that Doomlings is the least offensive of its ilk. It’s the tableau-building that does it. There’s a sense of connection that arises from arranging cards in such a way that they build on one another, amounting to a greater sum through their collaboration. It’s even organic, despite the incuriosity the game displays elsewhere. If this and Exploding Kittens were the only two games left in the world, I would pick this one. Maybe then I could master its ways, stuffing my doomed globule with so many kidneys that when the asteroid strikes, my vaporized blood would be the most pristine ever rendered back to carbon atoms.

Pick the best trait. Or don’t.

But that isn’t the case, and thank Darwin for that. There are countless better games, both for tinkering with evolutionary processes and for laughing with friends. The cute-but-not-cute foilboxes may have overwhelmed the grandmother shelf at our friendly local game store, but the cynicism, blandness, and anti-humor they represent shall have not a toehold here.

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A complimentary copy was provided.