Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein Review

Had the occupants of a holiday chalet in Geneva 1816...

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The subdued colour palette comes across more dreary than devilish

Yeah, my first look at that example pic made me think: "That looks... grey."

and the play mechanisms tend to rob the player’s narrative actions of their visceral heft, couched as they are in mathematic abstraction.

Aha! So it's Tiny Epic Quest, except not as fun! It does sounds kind of involved, mechanically, for a "storytelling" game. I'm not into all the "choose your own adventure" stuff most of the time, either. The only type of that game that I've ever held on to is Arabian Nights and that probably should've been traded/sold a long time ago.

the resolute Captain Morgan

Bottle or just a beaker?

I enjoyed the review. I won't even give this game a try, because the only thing worse than a euro game in my book is a long euro game.

Yeah it's grey. And not in a particularly evocative 'dense Victorian fog' sense either. Honestly the aesthetic stumbles are probably the single most disappointing element of the package here. They could have gone hog wild with it, instead we have art that is very competent, and equally generic. Maybe I just have a higher threshold for grizzly, but it failed to summon any thrills n chills in me.

I've not played any of the tiny epics so I can't comment there but I will say that Captain Morgan has probably 'seen some shit man' and thus wouldn't be adverse to a few drams of his titular tipple.

I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. I can appreciate a good euro, even if it's not really my jam. At least this one isn't about baking bread or trading beads.

The best thing I can say about this game is that it hints at a design space that it just... fails to achieve. There are some really interesting ideas here, for sure, but the WP options are so stolid and un-evolving that whatever crescendo is being conveyed by the event cards and the Captain's implacable timer is lost in 3 hours of extremely repetitive WP processing. The aesthetic limpness of it just made the decision to unload the game onto the secondary market that much easier. It's unfortunate because I can tell that whatever it was attempting to tap into was really quite powerful, but the heart of the design and that flash of brilliance in associating Mary Shelley's work, Ameritrashy events, take-that dynamics, and WP just got lost in the execution.

My company has a games channel on Slack; video, board, etc. One of my fellow employees told us on that channel that he loves this game. Whole family plays it all the time. A three-hour worker placement games did seem a bit long to me, though.

Agreed. My anticipation levels for the possibilities of such a design potpourri were only mirrored by my disappointment in their execution. Perhaps one of the officials variants released in order to truncate its running time may help alleviate the systemic blue balls that the third hour of rote placement engenders. It's definitely not a bad game, just not a memorable one. Which is perhaps an even more grevious failing.

That may be the nub of my issue actually. It probably is a great family game, but as such it kinda rubs against the grain of what it was perhaps hoping to achieve with its theme.

By establishing a heavy euro game bias early on, Boardgamegeek hobbled this hobby at a crucial early stage. Some gamers got so hung up on the euro games that they never tried anything else. So when they come up with a neat topic for a game, like say conducting a military siege of a castle or constructing a frankenstein monster, they are unable to choose suitable mechanics to express that topic, and fall back on the same few popular euro mechanics and components. Worker placement. Wooden cubes. Resource management. Tableaus. Bidding. Perhaps an elegeant rondel. It's laughably incompetent, and leaves the hobby cluttered with junk.

Yeah, the whole 'accumulate brown cubes' thing left me on the island too. To each his own I guess. Any medium is going to have its morass however, and in doing so it gives extra weight to the outliers.

Just to deviate a bit from the pile-on (though it's not a poorly argued one), here's what I wrote after three plays.

Great and dare I say elegant integration of mechanisms and theme. While there's flavor text (and pretty good text), mostly the theme is evoked by the player actions, which, to me, is far more valuable. Component quality is very good, particularly considering the very reasonable price. It's on the medium-heavish side, but we cut probably an hour off of our second 2p play and probably came in slightly over the 2 hours--and I don't really care whether it "plays long" if I'm having a good time, which I have been so far. If there's any downside so far for me, it's in the slightly annoying but fairly easily managed board reset at the end of rounds and a concern that, long term, the storytelling element's limited extent may result in repetitiveness (that I'm assuming an expansion could address in a game that doesn't seem like it otherwise would need it). One more thing, perhaps, is that the grey dice seem pretty harsh--one "alive" side and either blanks, humanity loss, or damage otherwise. This can be mitigated with substitution or card effects, and the damage is fairly easily removed and usually not fatal if done after several body parts have been built, but the weakness of the grey dice means that the one character's ability to add an extra grey die seems underpowered. Maybe it's too early to say that, though.

I certainly didn't intend to initiate such a kicking Hahaha! I can definitely see the appeal for some groups. Like I said, I don't believe it's a bad game, just a missed opportunity. Honestly with a little tweaking it could probably sing. Glad you're enjoying it!