Escape from Monster Island is a supplement to David L. Pulver & Patrick Sweeney's original Monster Island (read that review), a light miniatures game of giant monster conflict. It uses a cut down version of the Action! RPG system.
About the Background
Monster Island was the game of giant monster combat. This sequel is the next step: giant monsters fighting armies of poor humans. It's Godzilla attacking Tokyo and King Kong carrying half-naked women through the streets of New York.
As with the original game, a lot of the delight in this sequel is how vivid it feels and how evocative it is of the original source material. The designers clearly know what they're talking about in the world of kaiju.
Graphics & Layout
As with its predecessor, Escape from Monster Island is a 32-page saddle-stitched book.
The general layout is again simple, but simplistic. Amidst the layout, on every single page, are quotes which help give you the feel of the monster movies.
The United Nations is giving their full support to defensive preparations. Each nation has pledged armed divisions and heavy weapons. The main question is whether the men or the weapons can stop Godzilla.
--King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963)
The interior art is by Michael Bowden. It's slightly blocky line art. Some of the art is done as closeups, and I don't like those a lot, but the larger scale art, particularly one of a three-headed dragon destroying army units in Seattle, looks quite good.
Helpfully two cardstock sheets are included in he book to let you depict army units, starlets, police cars, Wonder Weapons, and the numerous other new items that you can use in this expansion to Monser Island. That's a very nice touch, though I'd generally suggst using plastic army men instead.
Ease of Use
I felt that Escape from Monster Island lacked somewhat in ease of use. Some of the organization was a bit confusing and a bit random. For example the rules for bombardment appear partially on page 11 & partially on page 21.
In addition I felt like a few charts were notably missing from the book, such as a key building chart and a thorough listing of how different monster attacks work versus humans.
Overall, the layout of the book is at best average and there are some usability issues, but the theming is wonderfully, monstrously fun. Escape from Monster Island earns a high "3" out of "5" for Style.
Book Contents
Escape from Monster Island is solely an expansion to the Monster Island system, not a game in and of itself. However, there are a number of new systems featured:
New Monster Rules: A number of new monster powers are introduced, and they're generally neat and in character. You get things like Acid for Blood and Cocoon. My favorite, Psychic Link, reads: "Your monster has established a psychic link with someone, usually a teenage girl or adolescent boy, or in some cases twin miniature princesses", which is overall a wonderful take on the genre.
New Movement: A number of new ways to move are introduced including Climbing, Leaping, and Wading. They're very colorful, and add some nice variety to the game.
Armies: A 7-page section introduces rules to create armies, so that one player can now put together a group of humans while the other creates a monster to rampage through them.
The army descriptions are extremely thorough. You put together a force by buying various units such as "mobile artillery", "infantry", and a "transport helicopter". There are rules for period forces and also "UN Science Alert Corp Forces", who have science-fictiony elements like flying tanks and Wonder Weapons.
These new armies also, of course, come with new rules for fighting armies. Humans have to deal with monster attacks, panic, and morale, while slowly trying to build Wonder Weapons or otherwise figuring out ways to drive away the monsters.
Cities: There are also some notes for designing cities, with the most attention spent on "key buildings" sucha s bridges, city hall, nuclear power plants, and sky scrapers. These can be important elements of scenarios, and also take some work for monsters to destroy; they have their own Evade and Toughness ratings.
With cities, you also get civilians. This includes the "Idol", a clear homage to King Kong and other movies of the era where the monster inevitably takes an attractive female captive: "An idol is a civilian who, for some reason, is especially attractive to monsters. Examples of idols are kidnapped, miniature priestesses, beautiful blonde movie stars, spunky reporters, psychics and famous pop stars." The rules for Idols, and their ability to distract monsters, are some of the most enjoyable ones in this expansion.
Scenarios: The book ends with a series of four scenarios. Often I find that this sort of miniature combat game can be weakened by players sitting around rather than fighting each other. Scenarios with strong goals can help overcome this, and thus I was pleased to see their inclusion in Escape from Monster Island.
Content Notes
Overall, Escape from Monster island is an excellent supplement to the original game. It develops the game in an entirely new direction thanks to the inclusion of rules for armies, cities, and civilians, and thus adds that much more replayability to the system. The focus on cities and humans also produces a nice thematic core for the book.
As with the original book, all of the theming feels dead-on, and that makes the fairly simple gameplay that much more enjoyable.
Escape from Monster Island earns a "4" out of "5" for Susbtance: another fine expansion to a fine game system.
Conclusion
Escape from Monster Island, along with the original Monster Island game, offers everything you need to play out your favorite monster movie scenarios. This new supplement has a great core focus on cities & humans, and thus is a worthwhile and nicely thematic expansion to the Monster Island series of games.
If you're just back from King Kong and have an urge to rampage, but have never heard of Monster Island before, take a look at Firefly's website because they're currently running a 2-for-1 deal featuring this book and the original.
