Doom: Arena Board Game Preview – Rip and tear, until it’s done

November 14, 2025

A prototype copy was kindly provided by Modiphius Entertainment. Rules, art, and components are all subject to change. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Modiphius are making some big splashes lately. Last year’s foray into video game franchises with Mass Effect (read my review here) was a hit, and this year they clearly thought “Let’s not f**k about, let’s go for the jugular” and have the massively popular Doom on their boxes. It will come as no surprise to learn that it’s not a quiet, sedate narrative adventure. Instead, it’s a balls-to-the-wall, kill-em-all skirmish fest in the style so many people love in their tabletop games.

doom arena player sheet — Doomguy comes in regular and enraged flavours.

Is it any good, though? Actually, yes. Somehow, it does justice to the Doom name and ends up being a really fun game for two.

If you know me, you’ll know I don’t always get on with skirmish games. They don’t tickle my dopamine receptors in the same way a good, meaty, beige Euro game does. I make the odd exception, like Mass Effect, which I mentioned above, but there’s got to be a good reason for me to want to play them. In the case of Doom, it was for the same reason as I said yes to Mass Effect – I’ve sunk so many hours into the video games I love of the same name that I want to see how they manage to capture what makes them.

Doomed! Doomed! We’re all doomed!

I was expecting Doom to be the kind of game where me and a bunch of friends make Mars run red/green with the blood of the hordes of monsters and demons the game throws at us. I was only half right.

cacodemon and doomguy — The sculpts even for a prototype are great. Cacodemon looking gorgeous here, darling.

Instead, Doom treats us to a head-to-head two-player duel. One player plays as the forces of evil, the other as the venerable Doom Guy. You battle to see who can spill the most blood, then swap sides and do it all again. When I say spill the most blood, I mean it. Blood is the game’s equivalent of VPs. It’s a skirmish game, so the idea is to manoeuvre around the hex-based board using terrain and cover to your advantage, in order to set yourself up to jump out, roll some dice and see who’s at the mercy of your boomstick.

Despite both sides aiming to do the same thing – put holes in the other – the two sides play quite differently. Doom Guy has slots where he can place the weapons he picks up along the way, and on each turn, decides how he wants to use his actions: moving, shooting, or a combination of both. The player with the bad dudes chooses how to spend their available points on monsters of different sizes. Each has a different way of attacking and different rules for movement, so it’s a tactical choice of swarming with relatively harmless imps or sending the cyberdemon into the fight, for example.

cuyberdemon — Oh yeah, Cyberdemon is here to play too.

The combat is handled in the same way most games of this ilk do it. Determine range, line of sight, then roll some dice and see what happens. There are a few tricks up its sleeve to keep things sufficiently fresh and Doomy. Take the imps I mentioned before, for example. If you remember the original game, as soon as they saw you, you’d have a fireball headed your way. The same is true in the game. If you want to attack on your turn with an imp, you have to make the attack before you move.

lots of dice in doom — Don’t worry, you get to chuck plenty of dice.

It’s just one example of the way the Doom: Arena Board Game tries to stay true to its roots. It should feel like the Doom Guy player has almost insurmountable odds stacked against them, but by manipulating the way the mostly dumb enemies have to behave, you can turn the tables in your favour to some extent. If you only try to run in in a straight line, all guns blazing, it won’t necessarily go well for you. It was true then, and it’s true now.

Final thoughts

There’s only so much I can tell you about this Doom board game, as I was sent an early prototype, so take everything you’ve read with a liberal pinch of salt. I’ve been playing with a single, large map, while in the final version, it will come with a double-sided small map and two double-sided large maps. It’d be really interesting to see how those other maps make the gameplay different. Regardless, I’ve enjoyed my time with Doom. It was always going to be a tall order to make a board game feel like a frenetic 90s FPS game, and the only one that’s really managed to do it so far in my opinion, is Adrenaline.

One of the map boards for Doom Arena — The map boards are practical, if not beautiful.

As someone who doesn’t usually reach for a skirmish game, I went into Doom with a sense of apprehension, hoping that the Doom feel would carry through, and to its credit, it does a really good job of it. I got such a cool nostalgia kick seeing the minis for Doom Guy, Imps, Pinky and the Cacodemon. I wasn’t expecting it to be an asymmetric one-on-one fight, but having played it now, I think it was the right thing to do. If it had been a case of flip a card, spawn a bunch of monsters, kill ’em all, repeat ad nauseum, it would have gotten old, really quickly.

Instead, designer Ben Maunder went off-piste and created a pretty unique duel. It’s quite unusual to see a big-box game like this made for two players, and two players only. Obviously, if you regularly play with a bigger group, it’s a no-go. The same goes for solo play, unless an official solo option is in the pipeline. It’s not the game that’ll convert you to skirmish games if you don’t already like them, unless you’re a Doom superfan. But if this sort of hex-based, duck-and-cover, run-and-gun action is your thing, Doom: Arena Board Game is honestly a great option. The minis, the artwork and presentation, the feel, even the way the enemies move and fire, it all feels very Doom.

It’s on Kickstarter right now, and you can back it here.

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