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.

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