Review: Necromolds

Every now and then someone comes up with something so brutally simple, so painfully obvious in retrospect, that you just have to stand up and applaud. Necromolds is such a thing.

Necromolds is, essentially, war-gaming with Play-Doh. That’s it, I could probably end this review here now and you’d know if you wanted to add this game to your shelf or not. And, let's be clear, not just add it to your shelf like some BoardGameGeek big game hunter but actually get it out the box and onto the table the minute it arrives because Necromolds is a game that you, and certainly anyone around you still in short shorts, will want to play, again and again.

For a start when was the last time that setting up a board game, let alone a miniatures wargame was fun? I've waited feverishly for months for certain games only to feel all enthusiasm deflate out of me upon opening the box to find a million, tiny pieces of grey plastic requiring my attention, long gone are the days when you could unwrap a new Warhammer game on Christmas morning and get a game in before lunch is served any more.

Necromolds compresses, literally, that rigmarole into a fun filled few minutes as you take your pot of putty, slap a blob inside one of the little plastic grimoires and squeeze out your army of misshapen, brightly coloured monsters. The base game comes with three different grimoires that can produce the smaller Mud Mump minions and the slightly more imposing Grave Ghouls and Insectimites. Expansion packs are available.

Once your rival mobs are assembled then you’re straight into the action. Players get to roll a handful of brightly coloured dice (everything in Necromolds feels turned up to 11) which you then assign to your various terrors, allowing them to roar across the battlefield, hurl magical attacks at one another or just engage in a good old fashioned putty-a-putty stompfest.

Now, anyone who’s played a game like Warhammer long enough will have probably spent at least a few minutes imagining the satisfaction of pulling out a 3lb lump hammer and turning your opponent’s models into so much dust. Well here you can, as every time you win a combat roll you get to slip on your casting ring and turn your the losing monster into little more than a satisfying splat.

I won’t go into the mechanics because frankly they’re irrelevant.Not that they’re bad, in fact they’re a nice little introduction to wargaming, but they basically exist to do exactly enough to make it feel like a proper game whilst doing as little as possible to get in the way of what this is really all about, gleefully squashing your opponents model into the board, probably whilst doing some kind of obnoxious dance.

It’s fun, it’s lurid, it’s the kind of thing that back when big games companies knew what they were doing someone like Hasbro would have released. It would have been inescapable for a good 12 months. We’re talking annoying TV adverts and a tie-in cartoon, spinner racks of new Grimoires in every newsagents, fights in playgrounds and special assemblies called by headmasters to bore on about the moral failings of a generation of violent monster smashers. It would have been glorious.

As it is they’re too busy trying to stuff every single intellectual property inside Monopoly, so it’s up to independent creators like Clint Bohaty to serve up the good stuff. Thankfully we live in a time when that’s possible, and so on that cheerful note I’m off to smash a few more monsters, and I suggest you do too.

Designer: Clint Bohaty
Art: Thad Stalmack II
3D Modelling: Thomas Grave
Available from Necromolds.com

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 6 (August '24)