In the interest of transparency, I received a complimentary copy of Doomlings – Imaginary Ends for review purposes. This did not influence my assessment, and the opinions expressed here are my honest and unbiased reflections on the game.

Imaginary Ends is the first Variety Expansion released for the Doomlings card game.  This expansion not only adds three (technically four but we’ll get to that) new categories of Trait Cards but also sees the introduction of Magical Merchants hocking their “awesome” Trinkets.  If you haven’t played Doomlings before, check out my review on the base game here or my YouTube video here as I’m not going to get into all the nitty gritty details here.  You can also check out my review for the second Variety Expansion, Legends of Enderas, here. 

Suffice it to say, players will be playing Trait Cards from their hand (into their Trait Pile) and taking the actions on the card.  Players will take turns back and forth, revealing a new Age Card at the beginning of each round.  This card will impact what players can, and can’t, do during that round.  Eventually, a Catastrophe Card will show up and wreak havoc on all players.  Once the third Catastrophe Card shows up, the game ends and everyone counts up their points from their Trait Piles to see who wins.  Trust me, there is more to it but that’s a good summary to bring you up to speed for this review.

Now let’s dive right in and take a look at what these Magical Merchant Cards are all about…

The Imaginary Ends expansion comes with 11 Merchant Cards and 40 Trinket Cards.  The Merchants are additional Age Cards that will have players dealing two into each Age Stack during setup, meaning the new stacks will include a single Basic Age Card, a single Catastrophe Card, and two Merchant Age Cards.  Two of the Trinkets will be dealt to each player during setup and they will choose one to keep.

First, let’s look at the Trinkets.  Each of these cards has both an Awesome Power and a Pocket Objective printed on it, along with a Victory Point amount.  The Awesome Power gives the owner a condition that stays in effect as long as the card is still face-up in their play area.  The powers listed on some of the cards are actually pretty helpful, while others are… less so.  It seems that this is mostly tied to the overall Victory Points each card is worth, with the lesser value cards having better Awesome Powers than their more valuable counterparts.  To give you an example, the Collector’s Cap trinket is only worth a point but every time the owner plays a Red Trait, they may draw 1 card.  On the other hand, the Fool’s Gold trinket is worth a whopping 4 Victory Points, but stops the owner from playing any Dominants into their Trait Piles. 

The trick is that the trinkets aren’t going to score any Victory Points for their owners if the Pocket Objective isn’t met.  These objectives range from easy tasks such as “play: 1 red” to harder objectives like “trait pile: 2 of each color.”  Regardless of the objective, once the player meets it, they are able to Pocket the trinket, meaning that they can flip it over, scoring it’s points at the end of the game and giving them the ability to draw a new Trinket Card during the start of the next Age.

You might be thinking that if a player draws a Trinket Card that either has a really dud of an Awesome Power or a difficult-to-achieve Pocket Objective, they’re kind of screwed for the game.  But never fear dear reader, this is where the Magical Merchants enter the fray.  When these Age Cards are flipped, they offer players a few different ways to interact with their trinkets, such as trashing a Trinket and drawing a new one or even Pocketing 1 Trinket and then gaining another one.

So far, sounds good right?  The problem is, it doesn’t really work all that great in practice, and I have a suspicion as to why.  The revealing of Age Cards in Doomlings is one of the key sources of fun in the game.  It adds a twist to every round and even if the card isn’t all that impactful, it keeps the play fresh.  Plus, the artwork on the cards is glorious to behold!  But with Imaginary Ends, you’re replacing a total of six Basic Age Cards with their Merchant equivalents.  And even though there are 11 Merchant cards, they are not unique in the slightest.  There is a set of four cards that are identical, another set of four identical cards, a set of two that are the same, and then one unique card. 

If a game lasts it’s maximum amount of 13 rounds, Imaginary Ends has players flipping over almost identical Merchant Age Cards approximately 46% of the time.  This change simply didn’t add any fun to the game.  Some of you out there might be totally against “house rules” but I’ve never been against them, especially if it helps get a game to the table more often than it was.  For me, I tried the game again but set it up a bit differently the next time.  I created the Age Deck the same as in the base game, but I kept the Merchant Cards close by.  Any time I flipped a Catastrophe Card, I’d also flip a Merchant and activate its’ action.  In this way, I wasn’t replacing any Age Cards but I was still giving players a chance to interact with the Merchants throughout the game. 

I’m sure there might be an even more elegant way of using these so I’d recommend players to be creative.  Or, maybe you’ll like the rules the way they are out of the box.  Either way, I think the Trinkets are fun and having small objectives throughout the game gives players more focus, but the standard implementation just wasn’t for me.

The Imaginary Ends expansion is also packed with a few new types of Traits: Deeplings, Moonlings, Glitterlings, and Fuzelings.  Let’s look at how these mysterious, and sometimes down-right goofy, Doomlings will impact your game.

Deeplings

We’ll start with the Deeplings as this category introduces a brand-new ability: Suppress.  Note this is not an Action so keep that in mind when playing and interacting with these cards.  Suppressing a card means that players will take a card (from either their Trait Pile or hand depending on the directions) and place it underneath a card already in their Trait Pile, but not a Dominant!  For the rest of the game, these cards, Actions and Effects are ignored, and they are each worth a single Victory Point at the end of the game, instead of the printed amount on the card.  Suppressing cards gives players an awesome way of turning those negative point cards into something positive! 

The slight artwork modifications on the 16 Deepling Traits really help these cards to stand out on the table.  Traits from the base game typically find the spherical characters on top of a stark white background, rimmed by a border of the card’s color.  With the Deeplings “lurking in the fathomless darkness,” the white background has been replaced by a sea of black, tinged with colored highlights.  This subtle artwork change definitely evokes stumbling across these strange creatures at the bottom of some vast oceanic trench.

Moonlings

Next up, we have the Moonlings, an even goofier version of the Doomlings found throughout the base game.  A majority of the cards within the game have some sort of quote from the character as flavor text and this is no different for the Moonlings.  The difference is found in their… unique language.  Some of the quotes on the cards include Nurpler’s, “Urt’s nurping turm!” [is this a play on the “It’s Morbin’ Time” meme?] and Fumplepop’s, “Fimple limple pumple fop!”  But let’s be honest, the flavor text isn’t all that important when it comes to gameplay, so what do the Moonlings do differently?  Well first off, they primarily reward players who operate with smaller Gene Pools.  On the flip side though, they tend to cause users to have to give up cards to other players so beware when playing.

Glitterlings

On the heels of the unorthodox Moonlings, Imaginary Ends brings us the Glitterlings: a species of Doomling who has never met anyone who wasn’t their friend!  Cards like Elegance allow you and other plays to discard any negative cards from hand, while Merry gains Victory Points based on all Dominants in your “friends’” Trait Piles.  But Glitterlings not only help the whole table out, many of them also deal in games of luck.  Cards like the purple Bedazzled has the user draw one card and if it’s effectless, it can immediately be played.  Additionally, if it is a Glitterling, the user can repeat the Action!  Sure, sometimes these draws don’t work out in the user’s favor but when they do, there is usually a big reward that comes with it.

Fuzelings and Extra Age/Catastrophe Cards

Rounding out the cards you’ll get in the Variety Expansion are Fuzelings, cards featuring a mash-up of the three categories introduced in this expansion, as well as a few extra Age Cards and Catastrophe Cards.  The Fuzelings are fun additions but don’t really stand out in their own right.  On the other hand, I do really like the extra Ages and Catastrophes, which is why it’s a shame that the Magical Merchants play out the way they do.  The Age Unusual Friends rewards player’s for getting the new cards to the table while Age of Reverie and Fading Away get players into the Suppressing action.  On the Catastrophe Card side of things, Abyss Stares Back can totally wreck a player’s plans by making them Suppress every card in their hand and if revealed at World’s End, it hits players with -5 points for having 12 or more Traits in their Trait Pile.

Imaginary Ends is a great expansion that brings a variety of cards to the Doomlings franchise.  While I don’t love the implementation of the Magic Merchants/Trinket Cards out of the box, players who don’t mind using some “house rules” can still make them an exciting addition to the game.  Altogether, this expansion almost doubles your total Doomlings’ inventory but it does come with a price tag identical to the base game so players might find this a little off-putting.  Personally, if you’re a Doomlings fan, I think you’ll be happy with it but if you’re only going to buy one Variety Expansion, I’d have to recommend Legends of Enderas over Imaginary Ends.  Visit my review on that expansion here.

Ratings are based on 5 main criteria: rulebook, setup, components, art & graphic design, and gameplay.  The first 4 criteria are rated 1 to 5 and the gameplay is rated 1 to 10.  These scores culminate in an “overall satisfaction” score that is rated from 1 to 10.  If the reviewed game has both a solo and multiplayer mode, I have assigned scores separately to give context to which mode we enjoy more.