I'm not even going to pretend this is an objective review. Doomtown was the first card game I ever did organized demos for, and it was the first step on my road to working in the game industry. So when my old friends at AEG announced they were bringing it back with new art, layout, rules tweaks, and best of all, no collectability (like many, I've sworn off any games whose cost of entry rivals that of a state university), I was more than a little excited about it.

For those who don't know about Doomtown, or the Deadlands setting in which it takes place, the town of Gomorra is the hottest spot in the Weird West. Zombies, spell-wielding hucksters, mad scientists, and all manner of other strangeness live alongside the town's trusty sheriff and dirty outlaws, and everybody wants to carve out a piece of the town. You choose one of the four initial factions and build your deck of Dudes, Deeds, Goods, and Actions, and use it to build up and take over more Control points worth of Deeds than your opponent has Influence on their Dudes. Every card has a poker suit and value, which you'll use to determine things like who goes first in a turn, and who wins shootouts.

The basic gameplay of Doomtown is simple: your Dudes have influence ratings (the red poker chip), and you can send them around town to your, and your opponent's Deeds. If you have more influence at a Deed than your opponent, you take control of that Deed and its accompanying Control points. You can move Dudes around by booting them, in which case they'll end up stuck where they are (unless they have a horse, of course), or by moving through Town Square, which takes longer and leaves them vulnerable to attack while they're in the center of town.

If you want to kick somebody out of a Deed so that you can take it over, you'll need to call them out. If your Dude calls another Dude out and they don't run home chicken, then you'll start a shootout.  You get to form a posse, they get to form a posse, and the lead starts flying. Every Dude has a bullet type (either stud or draw) and a rating.  After you both do whatever dirty tricks you have up your sleeves, you'll each draw a 5-card hand from the top of your decks, and add extra cards based on your stud Dudes. You can then discard and redraw some cards, based on your draw Dudes. Then you get to assemble a 5-card poker hand from whatever you've got, but it doesn't have to be a completely legal one – if, for example, you've got two 5s of Spades, that's still a Pair (or counts towards a Full House, or 4 of a Kind, etc.)…but it means your hand is Cheatin', and there are cards that you can use to punish your opponent for playing a Cheatin' hand. For every rank that your hand exceeds your opponent's, they've got to get rid of Dudes in the shootout.  You continue this way until everybody on one side is dead or chickened out and gone home.

For those already familiar with Doomtown, there have been some very interesting design tweaks that, overall, add to the game. Most importantly, no deck can have more than four cards of the exact same suit/value (e.g., 5 of Spades), solving one of the major problems that manifested late in the original game's life.  Additionally, you no longer simply ace (remove from the game) one dude per casualty in a shootout; instead, you can choose between discarding to cover one casualty, or acing to cover two. Finally, much of the focus of the game has been removed from out-of-town deeds like strikes; the vast majority of Control points are on in-town deeds, almost all of which give some benefit to their controller.  As a result, maneuvering around town is extremely important, and control of Town Square is a major advantage worth fighting over.

The card backs and layouts have been completely redone, and they look good. The art is somewhat less cartoony than the original version of the game, and evokes the Weird West theme beautifully.  For old hands, there are a few familiar faces from the original, and I can't help but gt the feeling that I've seen some of the Fourth Ring (creepy mystic circus folk) around somewhere…

The base version of the game (MSRP $39.99) comes with four preconstructed decks, cardboard tokens, and boards that help show how movement works. It takes two base sets to get a playset (4 copies) of cards, or you can buy the Premium set (cost unknown at the time of writing), containing clay chips, a fancy carrying case, and a full playset of cards.