Doom Savegames.. (how to save & resume a doom game)

Doom is a game that takes some hours & its natural that not everyone has the space to just let the game sit to continue next day - next week - ..

PC doom has an easy trick into this :) Savegames! And the same is possible with the boardgame! Just make sure to capture everything.

There s some posibilities in how to do it.
One of the techniques would be just writing it all down.. Easy for the players, a lot of writing tough & a bit harder to keep track of items lying around, scenario progress, monster & player positions, ..
An easier way to solve it all (the one we chose) would be to just take pictures of it all :) In this age and time, everyone has at least one digital camera lying around (no?) so this doesnt even have to cost anything (as opposed to clasic pictures)

First off, organise each player's cards into one picture..

The Marines..
Dont bother with the ref sheet & underlay - They re nice & easy to play with but you know you have them and would only fill up the image so Why Bother :D
You also need to get the health tokens right.. The total is dependent on the number of players so you dont need to know that, but the lost ones or left ones need to be kept into account.. Choose wichever is least, spread those out & put them in the picture.. Do remember if you took the ones lost or the ones left!! (we opted to spread out The Ones Lost)
Blue player - retake
Red Player
The minature in the picture determines wich players stats it are.
Dont hesitate to take 2 pictures for clarity!!

The Invader
The invader only has 3 significant stats..
The number of frags scored (lay out just like the Marine healt), the cards in his hand (simple picture would do, make sure the text is readable enough to distinguish the cards) and the number of cards on the discard pile (Write this down.. One could also keep track of exactly which cards were already used and which werent.. but we tough that to be too much of a hassle)
Invaders hand
Cards left (written down, 21 cards - kaarten is dutch for cards), player names (for reference), victory points


So far so good.. Now we know what the players had, time for the board..

For starters, its nice to have a big overview of the board.. Wich doors were open/closed, where the monsters are, player positions, etc..
Overview
To mark the two marines, we just pointed them out for the picture :) Its simple & it works.. Do check the lighting because you might accidentally shade out a space like the richt arm does in our picture.. I remember there being no monsters & an open door, but still..

As you noticed, the big picture is nice but its not Really clear where everyone fits in, so its nice (& well important) to capture the monster/player heavy areas with extra care..
We opted to take 4 pictures, one out of each ingame direction, as the scenario dedfines them)
North, East, South, West
Do notice the Compas thingy in the "North" picture
This way, everyone should be happy and discutions & doubt should be eliminated!

Now we have the whole game captured in a clear way for when we decide to play on.
Toughts about taking the pictures.. Try to have decent lighting & a neutral base to lay the things on.. If the base is too busy, you might have a hard time discerning the smaller pieces, certainly with the players tokens!
Also.. Dont try to rely on the pictures only.. The invading player has a scenario describing the playfield, the obstacles, .. !!

These were our toughts on saving a doom game to resume it later on, I hope you enjoyed our toughts :)

This is an article I just wrote for Board Game Geek about saving a Doom The Boardgame game so that one can continue playing it later..