6 Giant Monster Pieces: We have the eye monster Zorb, the Godzillia homage piece Tomangai, the King Kong homage piece Konk, the lobster man styled Megaclaw, the Blod inspired Toxicor and the giant insect Gargantis. Each of this is about 30 mm tall and while not as detailed as other figures for miniature games, can be used in role playing games like D&D.
16 Military Research Cards: Used to increase the abilities of your military units.
16 Monster Mutation Cards: Used to augment your monsters in various ways.
42 Infamy Tokens:
23 Stomp Markers: Used to denote areas that the monsters have ‘encountered’
3 Dice: Typical d6.
2 Giant Military Unit Record Tiles: Through military research, you can craft semi-giant monsters in the form of robots.
15 Plastic Sliders: Instead of using dice, gems or other knickknacks, the game includes sliders. These sliders are used to record a monsters health and can be slid up and down the health meters to keep accurate track of damage.
42 Military Units: Gotta have something to stop all those big bad monsters. These include 8 for each branch of military, of which there are five, and 2 black X-fighters.
Okay, now that the game contents have been listed, what’s the game about? Quite simple really. You’re a giant monster and you go around stomping stuff until the monster challenge comes at which point only the strongest monster survives. To start, each player picks one of the six monsters. The nice thing, is that since this is up to four players, you can mix up the variety a little and it’s not always the same monster.
Monsters have a starting health, move, defense, attack, damage, and a special ability. Each monster also includes details about their war cry and origin. In terms of movement, there are four types. The standard is land, with fly, lake and sea following up. These are important when considering water barriers, which are indicated on the map with a thick blue line in watery areas, such as coastlines.
The special abilities combined with the different modes of movement and starting health and move, give the monsters a different feel despite having similar abilities to start. For example, Zorb, the giant eye, has a starting health of 11, 4 land move, 4 defense, 3 attacks, and a damage of 3. For special ability, he gets 2 infamy tokens instead of gaining health for stomping a city. The good thing about infamy tokens is that they can be ‘cashed’ in for an extra attack at any time. Handy things to have. As an example of another monster’s special power, Tomanagi gets 1 extra attack in the first round of combat when starting in a sea or seacoast space.
The last player to select a giant monster, is the first one to select one of the military branches. The interesting twist here, is that you can’t select the National Guard, the fifth military branch. Each military branch is color coded so there’s no confusing the different units even when the pieces are the same. Some of the units can only be gained through the use of military research cards.
When looking at starting positions, the game board is marked with three possible starting locations for each giant monster, indicated by a silhouette of the monster. Players then place their monsters in one of those positions. After doing so, they then either deploy their military units, or draw a military research card.
When looking at actions you can take, you can move, fight, have an encounter and deploy. Movement is simple. The board game is broken up into hexagonal spaces and many of them contain various icons to represent things that the monsters can encounter. These include military bases, city, challenge sits, infamy site, and perhaps most importantly for the player looking to augment his monster, mutation sites.
In movement, there are a few simple rules. A monster has to follow the rules for it’s movement types. For example, if it’s land only, it can’t move across water barriers. It can never enter or move through a space containing another monster. It has to stop as soon as it enters a space containing a military unit, even if it’s one of your own military units. Last, a monster only has an encounter with a space it stops it, not one that it moves through.
Monsters have movement ranks listed under the starting health. Military units on the other hand, have movement based on the branch of military and the vehicle, indicated on the card. For example, the marines have fighters and rocket launchers with fighters have a 5 fly movement and rocket launchers have a 4. One trick here is that military units can be in a hexagon with military units from another player’s faction. This allows players to ‘team’ up and prevent valuable areas from being dominated.
Fighting is easy in the game. Let’s look at Gargantis. He has an attack of 3 and a damage of 3 and he enters a location with three tanks fielded by the army, with a defense of five and a damage of 1. If the attack roll is equal or higher than the defense value of the defender, you hit and do damage according to your damage rating. For most military units, that’s one so a hit equals a kill. In the above example, when Gargantis attacks the tanks, he has to roll a 5 or higher. If he fails, the military gets to attack back. If he fails to kill all the units in 2 rounds of combat, he’s forced to retreat.
What’s worse, when a monster’s health drops to zero, he’s sent to Hollywood, where he becomes an attraction. Every turn, the monster rolls a d6 and adds that result to it’s Health. When it’s Health gets to 5 or more, it breaks free and then can either move to Los Angeles or one of it’s lairs, ending it’s move.
In looking at an Encounter, it depends on where you’re at. In most cities, you roll gain a variable number of Health. For example, if you stomp New York, you gain 3d, which is 3d6 Health. Or if you stomp Roswell, you draw a Mutate card instead. You can only visit each mutate location once and further locations to that location give you no more mutations. Lastly, there are some places, famous places, that if you destroy, give you Infamy. When having an Encounter with a Military Base, the monster gets an infamy token and gets a unit, chosen by the player who owns the military base, as a trophy, removing it from that branch’s card or the game.
For Deploy, if you choose to deploy instead of taking a military research card, you can deploy 1 military unit in any given space per turn. You can only put them on unstompped bases belonging to that branch. National Guard are a little different. For example, the Army can place either 2 Army or National Guard and 1 Natural Guard. In placing National Guard, they can be deployed to any unstompped city, base or infamy site.
Also useful, is the idea of redeploy. Here you remove a unit and place it on any one of your bases. Now you can’t redeploy National Guard Units and you can’t redeploy the unique robots, Mecha-Monster or Captain Colossal.
After all the Stomp cards are used, the Monster Challenge is issued. The important thing here is that the player issuing the Monster Challenge doesn’t get to start the actual challenge until his next turn. This allows other players to fortify themselves one last time, or look for Challenge spaces.
Why would you want to look for Challenge Spaces? The person who’ve the challenge, can select who he fights first. This is vital in three or four player games where one monster has significantly less health then the others as that monster is the ‘easy’ pickings.
When monsters fight, you do a ‘weight in’ of each of the creature’s starting health and then the two monsters fight to the death. The loser then adds his current health to the other monster’s weigh in health. This can provide a big boost. In terms of variables, there are some things that can happen.
For one, if you’ve been hording the infamy cards, you can get in a few more licks. For another, the mutation cards can throw some twists and turns into the game. For example, Armored Scales gives you a +1 Defense with a –1 Move. How about Son of a Monster where you discard the card for an extra 2 attacks and 1 die of health to represent the Son of ? There are some good things there.
Ironically enough, if the player’s don’t take out the military units, they mind find themselves losing to them. If a giant military unit is still in play when the Monster Challenge is issued, they are fought last, don’t weight in, and don’t fight each other. If it wins the fight, it has saved America and it’s controller wins the game.
Looking at the pieces, they’re well done and I haven’t had any issues handling them. The cards are sturdy enough for casual play, but don’t go spilling hot tea on ‘em. The art on the cards is top notch. These images aren’t humor based but instead based on art that would be right at home in most modern RPG games in full color. And looking at the back page, I notice that it’s Ron Spencer, famed for his illustrations in Werewolf and various Dungeons & Dragons products, who lends the credibility to this project.
In terms of theme and use, the game covers that well in the military research cards and military cards. For example, if you want to move a monster, use the Blonde Lure card or the Chopper Lift Card. Want to see Tomanagi burn up the enemy? Get the Atomic Breath mutation card. For me, the military cards tend to ring very true to the movies with things like Cutbacks, where you take another character’s in play research card and Laser Fences to herd a monster.
For set up and storage, the board folds in four. The pieces are held by a container that’s laid atop it with the other pieces put aside it. So far I haven’t had any problems with the sliders coming off.
In game play, you have a lot of options. Are you more interested in putting as many units into the field as possible with the military in order to slow down your enemies progression? Are you more interested in gaining health from stomping cities or more interested in gaining infamy for combat augmentations or perhaps even mutations for long term gain? By preventing the monsters from fighting one another until the Monster Challenge, the game can’t be ‘won’ by anyone until the final showdown, but it allows you numerous opportunities to hinder one another.
What’s more interesting is that mutations can be caused and countered by military research. For example, Anti-Mutagen inflicts 1 Health level loses for every mutation card that the monster has whenever it encounters your units. On the other hand, Antimatter, thanks to it causing double damage in the first combat round, is very handy, but can also cause mutation.
As I get older, I find it easier to get two to three people together for a comparatively brief game, easier than say getting three to five people together for an all afternoon role playing game, even if it’s just a beer & pretzels dungeon crawl. With that in mind, I appreciate games with good graphics and easy game play that can be learned and ‘deployed’ in the same day.
Heck, I’m hoping that we see some non-collectible expansions for this in terms of monster monsters, research cards and mutations. Where’s the giant turtle? Where’s the giant moth? Where’s the two-heads mutation card? Where’s the military research card to combine your two mecha-military units into one giant monster token?
While limited in overall scope, Monster Menace America is a fun ride and can be played in less than two hours. Open up the board game and let Tampa beware the wrath of Konk.
