Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 1 hour

Components

Monster Mayhem comes with a board, various bits, and piles of cards.

The Board: A large 4-panel board. It's quite plain, mainly showing an empty hex field, but helpfully has a movement diagram and places for some of the decks of cards.

Cardboard Hexes: A set of twenty cardboard hexes. They're divided into four types (and colors): lairs, havens, hunting grounds, and districts. These duotones hexes simultaneously maintain the austere styling of the board and give it a little bit of color. Their biggest plus is that they make the game totally variable. Three suggested setups are given in the rules, but you can set up the board as randomly as you want.

Victim Chits: Each of the 30 victims gets a cardboard disc which shows their full-color picture and name.

Monsters: Each player receives a heavy cardboard monster sheet which shows his monster's powers and weaknesses, and also gives a chart for his craving points. There's also beautiful full-color artwork of each monster, which appears even larger on the back.

Each monster is also represented by a nice plastic figure. They've been molded in five different colors, so you can easily make out who's who from afar.

Overall, the monster cards and pieces are the best components in the box, and generally very attractive.

Cards: There are three decks of cards: 50 event cards, 30 victim cards, and 36 escape cards. They're all printed on medium-weight cardstock.

The victim cards are the most attractive because they have the unique artwork for the individual victims. The escape cards simply show off a color and a number. The event cards are purely textual, explaining various special powers.

Dice: The game comes with a set of very cool-looking green six-sided dice with purple pips. You actually probably want to have more than just these five dice when you play. I gave each player five dice when we were playing.

Rules: An 8-page rule sheet. It's black-and-white with almost no illustrations. Additionaly, examples aren't set off from the text, making them hard to find when skimming. It's thus not the most usable set of rules ever; fortunately, the game is quite easy to play.

Generally, Monster Mayhem is a game with good quality components. The attractiveness of the components varies widely, from the great monster cards to the plain event cards. Finally, there's the question of utility. I've complained previously about White Wolf's lack of attention to usability in their board game designs, and that's again true here. There are no icons to be seen, just seas of text. Fortunately, Monster Mayhem is a pretty easy game, and the lack of usability has little impact once you've played a turn or two.

Overall, thanks largely to those components which are great looking and to the super fun theming, I've given Monster Mayhem a "4" out of "5" for Style: good.

The Gameplay

The object of Monster Mayhem is to earn the most craving points by ... well ... eating people.

Setup: The board is setup with the 20 hexes being placed upon it. You can choose among three setups in the rulebook or else randomize the pieces.

Each player gets a monster and sets his monster piece in his lair. He starts out with 5 craving points.

Each player also gets three victims. He takes their cards and places the victims' pieces in the districts where they start.

The Game System: Monster Mayhem is obviously from an RPG company, if for no other fact that it has an actual game system which provides an overarching set of mechanics for how things work.

Rolling Dice. Dice are rolled throughout the game for initiative, for stalking (moving), for capturing (eating humans), and for fighting (battling monsters). In each of these situations you roll a number of dice appropriate to the skill and you take the highest result among the dice. Sometimes (as with stalking) this is a singular roll that gives a result. More often it's an opposed roll against other characters or against the stats of victims.

At any time prior to a roll, a player may decide to add dice at the cost of one craving each.

Fleeing. Victims flee whenever they can. Sometimes monsters have to flee too. This is managed by the 36 escape cards. Each one has a number (from 1 to 6) and a direction (encoded as a color). When someone flees they move the appropriate number of spaces in the appropriate direction, sometimes bouncing off the edges of the board, and sometimes stopping movement due to encountering another monster.

Powers. Each monster has a special power which lets them have a small advantage in the game. Mummies, for example, can influence the distance a victim moves. Powers can be used any time at the cost of a craving point.

Weaknesses. Each monster has a special weakness which can hurt them. These are triggered by a Trigger Weakness event card which another player can play at any time. Mummies, for example, can't draw event cards or use their power when triggered.

Event Cards. Players start with 5 event cards, and get new ones for crossing their lairs or the lairs of other players or for capturing victims. These cards can be played at various time to help yourself or to hinder your opponents; in other words, they're classic "take-that" gameplay mechanisms.

The Game Board: The gameboard contains some blank hexes as well as five special types of hexes.

Districts. These are the spaces where victims start.

Lairs. These are the places where monsters start. In addition, when you move over a lair you take an event card (from the deck if it's your lair, from another player if it's someone else's).

Havens. Monsters can't move onto these spaces. If a victims ends his movement on one, he permanently escapes.

Hunting Grounds. Moving onto one of these spaces gives a monster an extra space of movement, plus one Craving point if they currently have 4 or less.

Subways. These spaces allow instantaneous movement among themselves.

Victims: Each monster is "craving" a different thing. For example, mummies like organs and werewolves like bones. In turn, each victim has different scores in each of the five possible cravings, making them of different values to each monster.

Order of Play: On a turn on the players roll for initiative, then everyone moves their victims, then each player rolls stalking, then moves his monster.

Rolling for Initiative: Players determine turn order by rolling one die (possibly adding more by speding craving) and adding their craving score. The highest number goes first, starting with moving victims.

Moving Victims: Each victim is moved according to an escape card drawn for them, per the normal rules for "Fleeing". If he moves into a space with a monster, the monster can try and capture him (as discussed below).

Rolling for Stalking: To determine his movement for the round, a player rolls his Stalking score, which gives the maximum number of spaces that he can move.

Moving: A player now moves his piece, possibly taking advantage of lairs, subways, or hunting grounds. HIs movement automatically ends when he enters a space with a monster or a victim.

Hunting Victims. If he ended in a space with a victim the monster makes a capturing roll opposed by the victim's score in his associated craving.

If the monster wins, the victim is removed from the board. The monster gets the designated points of craving, +2 if it was one of his own victims. Then he draws an event card, from the deck if it was his victim, from a monster if it was someone else's.

If the victim wins, he flees again.

Fighting Monsters. If the monster ended in a space with another monster, they fight, using their fighting scores. The winner gains 1 craving, the loser loses 3 craving, flees, and "lies low" (meaning he can't capture fleeing victims until his next turn).

Winning the Game: The game runs for five turns, by which time most or all of the victims will be gone. The monster with the highest craving score wins.

Relationships to Other Games

There have been any number of monster fighting monster games and victims fleeing from monster games.

Most of them involve giant movie monsters. Monster Island is a more open-ended system based on the Action! mechanics while Monsters Ravage America is an Avalon Hill classic, recently reissued by Hasbro as Monsters Menace America.

Friedemann Friese's Fearsome Floors is a game that's about victims escaping (maybe). It's probably the closest in theming to Monster Mayhem, though it's a German design.

However, all of the above similarities are purely thematic; in the field, Monster Mayhem is a pretty unique game.

As I noted, Monster Mayhem feels somewhat like a roleplaying system. In fact, it feels a lot like White Wolf's own Storytelling System with its dice pools and the ability to expend "craving" to gain super powers.

The Game Play

I'm of two minds on Monster Mayhem.

On the one hand, the mechanics are sturdy and well-designed. Because a consistent system is used, it's almost always easy to figure out what you should be doing, and that gaming system is relatively simple and elegant (which isn't really a surprise given that it seems to be based on the well-tested Storytelling System).

On the other hand, the game is almost entirely random. Though the mechanics are strong, the gameplay doesn't actually build upon that. Between the monster powers and the event cards, there's a huge amount of chaos in the game. You add that to the escape cards and the dice rolls, which are pure randomness, yet insufficient in number to really balance things out. I think that the various ways in which you can spend craving just adds to the chaos, because the risk-reward payoff is unclear, and you often spend craving just because it seems a fun or appropriate thing to do, despite the fact that you're losing victory points in the process.

None of that is necessarily a complaint as much as a warning. Monster Mayhem really depends upon fun and silliness to generate good gameplay. If you get into themes and the idea of moving monsters around to eat victims and fight fellows sounds good, then Monster Mayhem should be a great game for you, but if you're looking for strategy or tactics, it'll fall pretty flat.

Because of the pure randomness of the actual play, I've given Monster Mayhem a "2" out of "5" for Substance.

Summary

Monster Mayhem is a game targeted at the beer and pretzels audience. It's got fun theming, quick gameplay, and is almost entirely random. If you like the idea of bashing around with a monster of your choice, it'll play great, just don't expect anything deeper.

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