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I really like Dawn of the Dead. Night of the Living Dead is one of the best horror films of all time - it may, in fact be the best horror movie of all time - but Dawn of the Dead took what could easily have been the same idea repeated in a shopping mall and made it something else. The protagonists get everything that they could possibly want - they live in a fully-stocked shopping mall - but it doesn't mean anything to them. It's a pretty sharp satire on consumerism, as well as being a wonderfully creepy film. But there's scenes in the movie - specifically, the scenes where the main characters clean the mall out and block off the entrances, sealing themselves from the outside world. It would make, I think, a great board game.
Maul of America isn't that game.
As a matter of fact, Maul of America wipes its ass on Dawn of the Dead.
"Why the rancor?", I'll bet you're asking. I'll tell you exactly why: I've seen Cheapass games with better production values than Maul of America. Maul of America costs $35 at its base price, and I'm willing to wager that the producers of the game rake in about $34.95 of pure profit every time a copy sells.
The game itself is astonishingly small for the size of the box that it occupies - you could pack it into a much smaller box if the plastic mall sheets that came with it were smaller, or foldable. As for what you get, it sure as hell isn't much. You get four double-sided sheets of plastic, with the map printed on it as colored squares. There is absolutely no art on the individual squares, no pattern that would indicate if it's a mall or a military installation. The walls are marked by thicker lines, which grow increasing hard to see the further back you are from them, and windows are marked by a dotted line. The colors are either drab greys or shriekingly bright reds and blues; there's no sense of place, just big grid with some lines on them. The stores are distinguished by their names - which are typically lame parodies of real-life stores, along with a little quote for flavor.
For example: "All Things Irish: If it's not Irish, it's crap!" (Scottish, goddammit, Scottish!) "Mideast Travel and Tours: You'll Have a Bomb", "Stone Books: Prices so low, it has to be a conspiracy." If you're thirteen, you'll find it amusing, but "humor" like this sets my teeth on edge. Dawn of the Dead, the game's most obvious inspiration, had a mood of quiet desperation; Dawn of the Dead goes for cheap, wokka-wokka laughs that are more likely to provoke wincing than anything else. There's nary a trace of actual wit, of actual humor, within the game, which is sad.
The cards. Oh, god, the cards. The cards make the game, basically, unplayable. Not because of their content, but because they're printed on basically what amounts to goddamn paper. I swear to Jesus that this is true. It's basically the same quality as wrapping paper, and it's so thin that you can literally see through the cards. Shuffling them is very difficult because the cards have no inherent stiffness to them, and cutting them out is an adventure in nerves because the paper is so thin. They tear easily, and one tear instantly renders a card useless - it's basically marked - so essentially, Maul of the Dead comes broken right out of the package.
Meanwhile, The Hills Rise Wild, Pagan Publishing's entry into board games, has twelve sturdy, color plates, glossy paper, beautiful art, and the cards are actually printed on, you know, cardstock. It's not designed to stop bullets or anything, but it is designed to at least avoid ripping while you're putting it together.
Maul of the Dead, by comparison, has stickers; and crappy stickers, at that. You get a whole bunch of plastic pawns, with a space on them to put a sticker of a zombie or a player. But the illustrations of the zombies are miniscule, and dwarfed by the brown field behind them; the player pawns are in Boogie Nights-style primary colors, the same kind that you see on safety scissors. There's absolutely no sense of personality to the pawns themselves; one of them's black, one of them's a woman, but they're so small that you have to squint in order to make out faces.
How does the game play? You set up the four, double-sided laminated map pieces so that the arrows are pointing at each other, although they don't always line up, and then place your pawns within any food court square. Helpfully, the rules don't specify what the Food Court squares are; I assume that they're the yellow ones, but the massive budget cuts designed to provide the authors of the game with more crack apparently caused the instructions to omit that detail. Since the food court area is surrounded with various food restaurants, you could interpret that entire area of the board to be a food court, or you could interpret the restaurants themselves to be the food court, or you could just put them on the yellow squares; either way, it's a headache to have to read the author's mind to figure out where to place the opening spread.
How you play works roughly like this: You roll two dice, and then take actions - one point to move, one to fight. If you roll a seven, you get a shopper's card, and the zombie side gets a card as well. All of the zombie controller's zombies have four action points, but can only attack on their last movement point. The goal of the shoppers is to go from store to store, searching question-marked squares to get items - or more zombies - while the zombies have to stop them and eat them.
The game doesn't play too badly, although the card effects are frequently overpowered or simply broken. The zombie gets to put on two zombies, plus an extra one for each zombie, at each entrance - but their slow rate of movement frequently means that shoppers usually wind up trailing huge wedding veils of zombies. Fighting through them isn't that difficult, just slow and moderately risky; unless you have a decided majority of zombies blocking a route, it's easy for the shoppers to fight through one or two and escape. And if they get the shotgun or the flamethrower, then every zombie within range is going to be set on fire. (The game, confusingly enough, doesn't specify whether you roll once for each zombie underneath the template, or if they're automatically hit. If it's the first, then you wind up killing two or three zombies and then running out of ammo, which makes them one-shot weapons; if it's the latter, then both weapons become very powerful.)
The problem, however, is the cards that you can play. One of them, "Scene Change", allows a player to teleport anywhere on the board; meaning that you could hypothetically jump from the middle of a huge swarm of zombies to an exit square without any trouble - which means that the twenty zombies that you've built up around that particular player are now useless. The one time that this happened, I just trashed the zombies, since they were three map units away from the nearest player and moving them would have been pointless. The card is broken, and yet the authors of the game don't seem to have any problem with it.
The cards themselves are also marked with the complete lack of humor; each of them has an appropriately awful quote that indicates that whoever was writing them was in entirely too much of a hurry.
Sample quotes:
In short, it's a mixture of the painfully lame and the painfully, painfully dated - rest assured, if this had been printed after the All Your Base meme / Plague of Egypt, that bastard would be showing up too.
The art is tolerable - it reminds me of some of the stuff that I've seen in Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia, although it only seems to be the style and not a specific artist. The cover of the boxed set is fairly amateur - look at the expression on the kid's face and try to figure out what he's feeling.(You don't want to hear my guess.)
You could easily make this a pretty decent Cheapass game; use any coin except a penny for the players, use pennies for the zombies, and make a whole bunch of smaller mall units with 8.5 by 11 pieces of paper. Unfortunately, the people who created this monster decided that they would be better off screwing the unwary consumer. The funny thing is that the Cheapass games have better production values than this turkey, and cost about $30 less.
When I bought this game off of eBay, I was hoping to pick up the new supplement that's being planned - the one where you can lock down various portions of the board, after Dawn of the Dead. I am now completely uninterested in doing anything regarding Maul of the Dead save warning anybody that I meet to stay the hell away from it. You'd be better off making your own game; no matter who clumsy and amateurish it is, it'd be better than this crap.
-Darren MacLennan
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