In this game you play as an evil guy trying to bring about the end of the world….yeah, you read that right.  Now, all players involved want to end the world, so it’s not good vs. bad.  It’s bad vs. bad.  To end the world you have to collect “skulls”.  You start off with five  skulls, and gain one per round (on your turn) and steal skulls from your opponents by attacking them with your creatures.  If you have 20 skulls, you win.

If you want to learn about how to play here’s an interactive demo, here’s a one page rule sheet, and here’s the developers plans for the UNRELEASED set (hardcore nerds, you’re welcome.)

Why did this game fail?  Well, rumor has it that production of the cards was too expensive because the cards are made of PLASTIC and plastic is made from OIL.  Remember when you had to pay $4-5 dollars for a gallon of gas?  Yeah, not so good for making plastic either.

You see Hecatomb isn’t like most card games.  The cards are plastic and have five sides.  Here is a picture of one of the cards.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/207182

This is a very unique aspect of the game.  The cards represent different creatures that you “stitch” together to form bigger, crazier creatures.  The cards have four clear sides which lets you see the names and abilities of the lower creatures.  Some also have abilities that activate when the top card matches the color on the card below it (see the tiny triangle space below the picture on the card).

The unique card structure is great at first.  The cards are extremely durable and easy to clean (washcloth and water), but it is really, really weird to shuffle a deck of 50-60 of these cards.   Also, how are you supposed to store and transport these?  They don’t fit into any card sleeves or binders that you own.

I put mine in a box and let them slide around.  I used elastic bands to hold decks together, but just seems odd.  Since I paid a very low price for these cards it didn’t bother me, but collectors would just HATE this aspect of the game which is another rumor why the game didn’t make it.  Specialized deck boxes and card holders were created, but those were just another expense that MOST card games don’t have.

The last idea is that the game didn’t sell well because of its dark theme, and it is DARK.  This is not a game for your 10 year old cousin.  I can’t show too many examples because I’m using this for my high school class, but there is LOTS of gore and SATANIC devils/demons/occult imagery.  This was part of the draw, but also part of its downfall.  If you love H.P. Lovecraft or zombies, this is the game for you.  But if rotting flesh sitting on a pentagram makes you freak out, you won’t be interested, and scaring off parents of young players is a sure fire way to kill an audience.

Game play wasn’t a problem for this game.  In fact it does several things right.  It has a good resource management system; Once per turn you can take any card from your hand and place it in your resource row.  Then  you tap the required number of creatures (with at least one being the same color as the card you want to play).  You have a decent draw system, so you can play almost all of your cards within the timeline of the game.  The building of skulls each round is a great way to put an eventual deadline to the game without forcing a certain number of turns.

One issue I had with this game is the length in a two player game.  The back and forth/rally time of some games can be hard if you only go to 20 skulls.  One fix to this is to play with fewer starting skulls or to play to a larger number of skulls.  Also, the game is just much, much better in a four person free for all format.  Multiplayer  is where this game shines.  The game gets better with more people playing (I’ve only played with up to five, so maybe 8 people wouldn’t work.  I don’t know).

I really liked the balance of cards.  I built one deck out of almost all rare cards and another completely out of commons and uncommons, and the decks were about equal.   If I played against a pro with a tournament deck, I probably would have lost, but the balance isn’t so much related upon rarity (which is nice for us cheapos).

Unlike Hecatomb’s famous beloved brother, Magic: The Gathering, Hecatomb doesn’t have resource problems, it doesn’t suffer from power issues, the game never really stalls out, it is much cheaper, and it fun and easy to play, it has a powerful card search engine to let you look up which cards work well together (found here) but it does have an emo streak and works best with more than two players.

So if you are interested in this game, here’s the monetary run down.

Original price: Starter $12.99/13 card Booster Pack $4.99

Now: Starter about $3 counting shipping/ 24 Booster packs (1 Booster box) - $13 counting UPS shipping

I bought my three boxes from http://www.wholesalegaming.biz/hecatomb/ when you could get three boxes (one from each expansion) for $24.  Obviously the price has gone up($45), but you still save around$107 per box when you consider their original price.

One last piece of advice: don’t buy starter decks.  They are just 40 random cards with less rares than buying the same number of cards from boosters for a lot less money.