Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein

I've got this and while I haven't been able to try it yet, I've looked it over and it seems like the kind of thing I go nuts for. Flawed in ways that will turn alot of people away (it's got a long playtime, a grim theme and realistic, grotesque art to back it up) but it will be so weird and the Frankenstein theme will speak to me so much that I overlook it and champion the game anyway, like I do with Bloody Inn or Last Friday.

Interestingly enough, this last GenCon marks 10 years since Colby first started showing people an advance copy of Summoner Wars, complete with the paper mat and illustrations-that-looked-like-dudes-posing-for-daguerreotype.

This thing sounds fucking wild---people around here know I love really out there worker placement games (e.g. Argent). Will be waiting to hear if any contributors or members play it.

Gary Sax wrote: This thing sounds fucking wild

That was my exact reaction when first hearing about it.

It’s no secret that I love the classic Universal Monsters and any source material they were based on, but the story of Frankenstein has always been my favorite. Love the book, the Jack Pierce make up, the Universal films, the Hammer films, the creature as he is in The Monster Squad, etc, etc. Dracula has been fairly well represented in gaming but I’ve always wanted to see someone take a stab at Frankenstein. Reading up on this game, it was a series of me sitting there saying, “Of course!” Of course worker placement, of course the object is creating a mate for the creature. The resources decay, getting fresh resources have a moral cost, it all sounds very cool and spot on. I was the target audience for this thing, dead center.

You can’t get through a review of the game without hearing about the artwork. Looking through mine, yeah, it’s going to be a barrier to entry for a lot of people. It’s way more gruesome than any other mainstream game out there, but I’m kind of glad they went that way when they certainly didn’t have to. Our desensitization to the story of Frankenstein has lessened the idea of what this guy was doing, making a living thing out of dead parts. The first Hammer film did a better job of handing that than most, and I welcome this game in immersing you in that often sugar-coated part of the story.

Looks like a fancy paint job on a familiar set of mechanics.

I played it at GenCon, and it's good, but very, very long. We played (2 player) through the beginning of round 5 of 12, and it took a little over 2 hours. It's easy to learn, has a great theme, and the actions themselves are fairly straightforward. But each action leads to multiple decisions on how to use it, some of which you don't know the options until you've taken the action.

It seems thematically appropriate for The Heir of Frankenstein to be a slow, heavy euro.