I don’t play too many monster-themed board games. Unless it’s in the Cthulhu world, and even then I’m referring strictly to Arkham Horror or Cthulhu Wars, monster games don’t usually draw me in. That is … until Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein by Plaid Hat Games. This worker placement game is strategic and fun, and, surprisingly, oozes with a unique theme that even a sometimes curmudgeonly eurogamer like me can appreciate.

In Abomination, scientists are working in Paris to “collect” muscles, organs, blood and bone, and the occasional animal part when really, really needed it. And I say “collect,” because what you’re really doing is raiding hospitals, morgues, cemeteries and other suspicious Parisian locations for the freshest cadaver parts required to create your very own monster!

Each player comes with a player board to place your resources, and three dials that keep track of your humanity, reputation and expertise. They also get a character card, which gives you variable player abilities, as well as two assistants and one scientist meeples. Later in the game, as your reputation increases, you can add an additional assistant, and you can trade them out for scientists, too.

Acquiring more scientists is important because locations on the board have placement restrictions and they show which type of meeple will activate that location. Some are either/or, but the majority of them are reserved for scientists. If you don’t have an available scientist during the round, you cannot place your meeple there. Also, some locations give you more benefits if you place your scientist there instead of your assistant.

Abomination goes for 12 rounds, with four phases each round. At the start of each round, the event phase happens, and the first player draws from a deck filled with events or encounters for the round. The city phase is when players place their meeples one at a time on the player board. In addition to locations to find cadavers, there are also places where you can work for money, gain expertise or reputation, buy and sell items at the market, or hire some questionable characters to acquire some resources.

In most eurogames, when a meeple is placed at a location, that location is closed to the rest of the players for the round. This isn’t the case for Abomination. Players can pay money to bump a meeple, so that the location will be available for them to use. There are only three meeples that can be bumped in each round, and those meeples go to the bump track at the bottom of the board. The bumpee pays the person who is being bumped 1 franc (or 2 francs if it’s the third and last bump in the round) to go there (or pay nothing if you’re bumping yourself). There is a lot of bumping that goes on in the middle of the night.

Lastly, the person who took the first-player spot can place that meeple can make a legal move to an open location. We always call this mechanism  the Waterdeep move (because in Lords of Waterdeep, there are meeples that get to move after everyone has taken their turn.). The person who took the first-player spot cannot be bumped during the round. 

When everyone passes or have no more legal moves to make, the lab phase occurs. This is when people turn in their resources to make body parts, according to the resource and expertise requirements. Complicated body parts like the head require more expertise than say an arm. You gain VPs based on the decomposition of the body parts, as well as 1 expertise.

If you time it correctly, you can actually gain the expertise and VPs by building body parts in a certain order, so that you can meet the next expertise threshold. Super neat! Players can also complete a monster part, which involves collecting blood in addition to body parts, by flipping over their body part from the muscle side to the skin side up.

Players can also throw the switch to shock their monster to life, but they also run the risk of inflicting damage, which can degrade your body part if you have enough of it. The dice rolls are this stage in the round can be a little punishing, but there are research cards you can gain at the Academy location that can mitigate the dice effects. Plus, gaining expertise will give you the option to use the more favorable blue dice.

The last phase of the round is the reset phase. This part, in my opinion, features the most clever mechanism of the game. On your player board, when you find a cadaver, the cadaver card will give players either expertise or body parts. If you go to the hospital, you will receive Stage I or Stage II body parts; if you go to the cemetery, you’ll get less fresh parts, more likely Stage III or Stage IV parts.

During the reset phase, after you’ve built your body parts for the round, all your unused body parts will decompose one stage. This timing element is important because when you build body parts with less-fresh body parts, you will net fewer VPs. If you haven’t used your body parts by Stage IV (or preserved your materials from the lab phase), they you lose them. You can purchase ice from the Market to stop the decay though. The reset phase also wipes cards on the board for new ones and moves the round marker forward.

Abomination is great for horror fans and heavier gamers alike. Even though the box says 60-120 minutes, I cannot imagine ever getting through a game in under two hours. The 12 rounds take a while — even though there are events or cards that can move the round marker meeple forward — and there are a lot of difficult decisions to make, with decomposition creeping up on you.

I love the variety of locations on the board, including the Dark Alley, where you’ll get the freshest body parts — and a lot of them — for the dark price of some of your humanity. You can always visit Saint-Roch to atone though, but if you murder too many times, well, you’re irredeemable because the humanity dial locks you into that super negative space, and you lose a lot of VPs in the end. The events and encounters keep the rounds different, and the objectives also help factor into the decisions you make in the game.

The artwork in Abomination is gothicly interesting, and I appreciate the diversity in the cast of characters, even if it can be a bit too morbid for some folks. The game is not light by any means, so you’ll need to devote some time to playing it. The game really comes alive as people start assembling their monsters, which takes a few rounds to get going, and hopefully your creature is alive at the end as well!

Thanks Plaid Hat Games for sending me a copy of this game!