Game creator mummylaundering first wrote us about their game on March 5th, 2025. We, of course, said that we’ll be happy to look at it once it hits 1.0. And now, slightly more than a year later, we’re here, reviewing Brimstone and Lead!
Listen to the Fortified Niche episode.
In Brimstone and Lead, DOOM (2016) has come to pass. Your world was eaten by Hell. However, you were spared by some angelic/demonic/centrist power. In exchange, you became one of their eternal soldiers, fighting and dying again and again. You may say it’s close to the experience of a multiplayer FPS character. That’s because it is – that is part of what Brimstone and Lead tries to emulate.
Granted, in shooters like Quake III, you’d expect characters to be meaty and festooned with guns. Not so in Brimstone and Lead. Each trooper can take one Strain, putting them out of action before they Rally, while taking a single Wound kills them. However, they can soak any harms with Adrenaline, gained from moving really fast and killing enemies. That’s what the green dice on the table represent.
However, Adrenaline also powers active abilities of your guns and it can be used to move further, so you’re always weighting survivability vs. achieving your goals. This is very important considering that, in this game of alternating activations, you can use a single model as many times as you want during a turn. You’re fixed at five activations (and your team is four troopers strong), but all of them can be dumped on a single guy.
However. With three turns per game and five activations per turn, Brimstone and Lead can turn more deterministic than most. Even if none of your troopers die (respawning at your edge of the table at the start of the next turn), you’re still limited by your sum 15 actions per game. At the start of turn three, you may find that you just don’t have the actions left to win, even if you’re playing the game with full three (randomly chosen) objectives.
Two more things complicate this: Strain and counter token. Strain can be accrued in multiple ways (including firing the sniper rifle) and only goes away if an activation is spent to Rally. And one of the nastiest ways to get Strain is the opponent playing the counter token when you select a model to activate. That’s its basic use: stopping a player’s plan dead in its tracks, not only Straining a piece, but also forcing them to activate some other unit. You then hand over the token. The token also grants you initiative at the start of the turn. It can also be used to give a trooper a major boost, but we only did that once.
Lest we forget army building like I forgot the mixed hex/free movement nature of the game: army building is short, something the developer admits. There are three classes of trooper in the game, balancing between movement speed and resistance to getting wounded. They start with a knife and can take one other weapon. Those weapons are closer to actual classes, as they not only have simple combat stats, but also a handful of active and passive abilities. For example, the assault rifle and chaingun incentivise you to use them in supporting other minis. The Flamethrower is for area denial. The shotgun is also a melee weapon, actually.
In conclusion Brimstone and Lead is a neat little game that tries to do many things differently. It also plays really fast. The writing is solid, too. For how little lore there is to the game, it’s very evocative. Shame it’s not my type of game – but it can be yours. And mummylaundering is tirelessly working to expand it already, so the future may be brighter, even if still set in endless Hell.