D.A.M.N!

D.A.M.N! is a digital board game built on the German classic in which players race pieces around a track and knock opponents’ pieces back to the start. The developer describes it as an attempt to make that classic deeper and less dependent on luck. It ships with four ready-made rule sets, two of which preserve classic play unchanged, while the rules as a whole are broken down into roughly 25 configurable elements. These cover matters such as what earns an extra move, whether safe zones exist and how many, and a Peace mode intended for younger players. The dice modes include a fairness check that reports the average roll, how evenly each face appeared and the length of same-face streaks.

The central addition is a card mode, available as one of the configurable elements or through the DAMN Cards preset. Every player draws from an identical deck of movement cards, action cards and junk cards, with three difficulty levels controlling how many junk cards are present. Players see only their next five cards, and only on their own turn, which allows several people to share one device. Four piece classes, Tank, Saboteur, Underdog and Scout, can be enabled for any race. Each class has passive abilities and an active ability (ult) that must be recharged; these can be used with passives alone or with ults added. Interactions include a Tank that cannot normally be knocked out, a team-wide shield that drops if its caster is removed, freezes that stop a piece for a turn, and a Block Actions card that disables enemy action cards for a turn. Races are animated cosmetic skins tied to several themed worlds, each with its own music and ambient sound, and confer no gameplay advantage.

A single match can mix online players, hot-seat players and bots, the latter available in three difficulty levels. A bot takes over a seat if a player disconnects and returns it when they come back. The game auto-saves at the start of every turn on every participant’s device, so a match can be restored from any player’s save, resumed across devices or continued online from a table-based game by invitation. In-match notifications mark plays such as first knockouts, and a post-game summary lists knockouts, losses, rockets, freezes, distance and points per player, with all-time statistics and match history accessible from the main menu. Points earned for plays are recorded, and the developer states that spending them on cosmetics, along with additional worlds and races, is planned for future releases.