Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein

Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein has that pleasingly Gothic quality of turning the table into a badly lit laboratory for an evening. It is a mid-weight euro with a little Lords of Waterdeep and Trickerion in its bones, yet the theme is more than a coat draped over the mechanisms: every attempt to assemble something that probably ought not to live carries it along. We reached roughly the end of round ten in a little over two hours, and the much-discussed length never felt especially burdensome. On a Tuesday after work, I consider that rather good news.

The game moves through choices and action placement, asking you to pursue the things required for your experiment. There is real thematic weight to that work, but the play itself can be rather dry: the decisions do their job without always gaining the tension the setting seems to promise.

The rougher element is the die, which can quite literally shut off available spaces and cut you away from the plan you had made. It is not the sort of random interruption one usually expects from this kind of game, and it leaves an odd gap between careful planning and what the turn finally permits.

For all its faults, this is an interesting piece that deserves at least one outing for the sheer amusement of its premise. The official, tighter Igor Rules also look light-years ahead of the base game as written.