All Your Base Collector Information

Monsterpocalypse Series 3: All Your Base is a smaller set than the two previous sets. While All Your Base features both metamorph monsters and installations, and thus more individual figures than the previous set, there are actually fewer monster booster variants in this set. So, we want to catch you up on the full scoop so you’re armed and ready when the set drops next month.

Let’s talk monster boosters first. While there were 12 different monsters in the previous sets, All Your Base presents only six metamorph monsters, which should make them a little easier to collect. Each booster contains one metamorph monster, its four corresponding morphers, and a sheet of the rules you need for playing with metamorphs and installation. Monster booster cases still contain 12 boosters, so buying a case should yield you two sets of metamorph monsters and their morphers.

Installations and units are sold in cases of 12, and six boosters should yield a set. There are six installations (one for each faction), which come one to a booster, and 18 units (three for each faction), which come four to booster (one ★★★, one ★★, and two ★). The set offers a total of six ★★★ units, five ★★ units, and seven ★ units. Thus, buying a case of unit boosters should produce two full sets of installations and units. The rules for playing with installations are included on the rules sheet that’s in the monster booster.

One final note: Due to some mistakes I made between printing and collation, the rarities printed on the figures are not correct. The correct rarity for the figures is as follows. While Monsterpocalypse Series 3: All Your Base will prove to be one of the all-time great expansions in CMG history, every diamond has a flaw.
7/54 Despoiler – Grunt ★
8/54 Despoiler – Elite ★★ (was printed ★★★)
9/54 Nullifier Pod – Grunt ★★★ (was printed ★★)
16/54 Sun Drone – Grunt ★★★ (was printed ★★)
17/54 Shadow Raider – Grunt ★
18/54 Shadow Raider – Elite ★ (was printed ★★★ )
25/54 Anti-Aircraft Tank – Grunt ★
26/54 Anti-Aircraft Tank – Elite ★★ (was printed ★★★)
27/54 Fuel Truck – Grunt ★★★ (was printed ★★)
35/54 Tanglix – Grunt ★
36/54 Tanglix – Elite ★★ (was printed ★★★)
34/54 Cthulubite – Grunt ★★★ (was printed ★★)
43/54 Constrictor – Grunt ★
44/54 Constrictor – Elite ★★ (was printed ★★★)
45/54 Explodomite – Grunt ★★★ (was printed ★★)
52/54 Green Fury Van – Grunt ★
53/54 Green Fury Van – Elite ★★ (was printed ★★★)
54/54 Spikasaur – Grunt ★★★ (was printed ★★)

My sincerest apologies go out to the Monsterpocalypse community. This is my bad, and I have made sure these mistakes will not happen again on future sets of Monsterpocalypse—you can send your complaints directly to me via Facebook. You can also get a copy of the collector’s postcard, which lists the correct rarities, here.

Monsterpocalypse Series 3: All Your Base has a lot to offer the play environment. Playing with the metamorphs and their morphers is a unique experience, and the addition of installations means you can bring some interesting boons for your force to the table —especially if you are playing with one of the installations that can attack! But I will tell you more about that next week.

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Morphers!!!

Monsterpocalypse Series 3: All Your Base features an all-new type of monster, the metamorph! These new guys are going to be hot. Dang hot. This will be the most dramatic change to the Monsterpocalypse play environment since the release of the game.

Metamorphs are monsters that use four morphers as their alpha form. Morphers are small-based monsters that interact with terrain like a unit but use abilities like a monster. Further, they can be targeted with abilities and power attacks like a monster. During the game those four morphers come together to form their metamorph monster for some real destruction!

Playing with morphers has its advantages and its challenges. One advantage is that morphers are each allowed to move and attack independently, and they can make combined attacks together. This allows you to send a pair of morphers against the enemy monster to deliver some damage while the other two morphers focus their attention on pesky units or generate power dice by brawling a building or two. The challenge is the obvious dice burden that comes with moving and attacking with four different monsters in the same turn. When you add up all the boost dice among all the morphers, however, they usually outpace a normal alpha form’s total boost dice—but then again, a normal alpha form does not have to spend 4 action dice to use all his boost dice, either.

Since morphers do not have a power stat (and thus cannot make power attacks, though they can be power attacked by other monsters), each set of morphers was designed with at least one premium ability (Beat Back, Toss, Weapon Master, Crunch, and so on) as well as one mass–unit-killing ability (Radial Attack, Explosion, and so on). This allows them to put the hurt on the enemy monster while focusing some pain on the enemy units as well. But when it comes time for your morphers defend against an attack, they have some susceptibilities. Morphers are all little dudes, and while some have greater a defense than others, they all come in around the 4–5 range. Further, since morphers share the alpha damage track on the health tracker and they can all be hit with an ability like Explosion on the same attack, their damage can add up quickly unless you position them carefully on the map!

Playing with morphers allows you some other options as well. Because they interact with terrain like units, they can hold objectives and secure buildings. And rather than having to start the game in the monster starting locations, they also have the option of beginning adjacent to a spawn point. This allows you to place the morphers adjacent to a building you wish to secure; then on your first monster activation you can make a power up roll that will yield more power dice than a normal monster can usually provide. This head start in the power dice department can allow for quick damage or allow you to move into your metamorph form sooner.

The metamorph is the full-sized monster who uses the morphers as his alpha form. Once in play, a metamorph acts exactly the same as a normal monster hyper form.

When a metamorph enters play you place him on the map so that at least one of his spaces overlaps one of the spaces occupied by any one of your morphers. This allows you to keep your opponent guessing about where you might place your metamorph, am uncertainty you can use to your advantage. Some monsters prefer to keep some distance between them and the other monster, and others want to be aligned and ready for a power attack. Morphers give you the advantage to place that incoming metamorph right up on the opposing monster, or across the map. To cover every possible instance of putting those metamorphs into play, the Series 3 rules allow your monster to clear away units and buildings that may be in the way of his placement. If even that won’t give you a space for him, you can bring him into play along a map edge.

The metamorphs and their morphers posed some interesting design challenges, but with the help of a great crew and some awesome playtesters we were able to come up with a new way of playing Monsterpocalypse that is engaging and remains balanced. For every advantage to playing a morpher, there is also a disadvantage. When squaring off against morphers, you will find yourself changing gears in your plan of action. When fielding a force using morphers, you will find yourself approaching your strategies against the standard monsters in a whole new way—much like when you play a multi-monster game. The morphers were designed with both the player and his opponent in mind. Jason once mentioned that when playing against morphers he would first think, “Yes! I’m playing against morphers!” This would be followed by a second thought of “Darn. I’m playing against morphers.”

Monsterpocalypse: All Your Base introduces six metamorph monsters. Additionally, the set includes installations (a special type of building I will tell you about in the next post) and of course, awesome new units.

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The Best Laid Plans

Hey, Monsterpocalypse peoples. This is DC (PPS_Dacarnix) popping in to Erik’s blog to talk about Monsterpocalypse strategies and the Monsterpocalypse strategy guide for Series 2: I Chomp NY. Before I go any further, I just want to say what a great time I have reading some of the threads in the Monsterpocalypse forums. We’ve got a great community built up so far, and I really enjoy seeing the excitement and creativity of that community. If anyone reading hasn’t had a chance to see light-up Zor-Maxim or cow-abduction Ares Mothership, you really owe it to yourself to check out some of the neat things fellow players are doing with Monsterpocalypse: http://forums.monsterpocalypse.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1015.

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Movies Then and Now

I just saw the new trailer for the new Terminator movie, and it was hitting all the points a new Terminator movie trailer should hit. Then, out of the blue a giant kaiju-sized Terminator emerged and crushed a building. It was practically Monsterpocalypse, Terminator style! Okay, so maybe Warner Brothers didn’t include a giant Terminator in the new film because of Monsterpocalypse—but clearly, oversized monsters and robots are a sign of the times. Technological advancements in special effects have moved the giant-monster genre out of the realm of big rubber suits and cartoons and toward a realism that could make a first-time moviegoer wet himself.

Did you know movie trailers are not allowed to have a gun pointed at the audience? Apparently, in 1903 a trailer for The Great Train Robbery included a scene where a character unloaded his gun into the camera. The movie patrons who first saw this were so freaked out they ran out of the theater thinking they were under attack. Can you imagine what those people would have done if they had seen the giant Terminator rising out of the building and coming right at them? Movie making is at a point where anything we can imagine, we can make appear to be real.

This doesn’t mean the classic kaiju film has been displaced; those rubber-suited combat scenes will always hold a special place of awesomeness in our hearts. But there is something especially great about seeing one genre being incorporated into another. The kaiju films of yesteryear needed a lot of resources to give Godzilla or Ultraman an environment they could exist in: sets had to be built, costumes made, and tiny flying saucers hung from strings on a pole. These days, if you want a big monster in your movie you just call up ILM and presto! Giant Terminator emerges from a building! That’s pretty cool in my book. While new films like Cloverfield will still be created, many others will be incorporating more and more giant monster-sized creations into their films because the technology is so much more readily available. Heck, for the past six months I’ve been seeing a commercial for an online car shopping site that features a kaiju-sized car shopper picking up cars and walking over buildings. If a simple commercial can work in those special effects, there’s no stopping a movie with its monstrous budget (pun intended). It’s a good time to love big monsters!

In Other News

Monsterpocalypse Series 2: I Chomp NY is currently being printed and produced. The final proofs for the stat cards were sent back this week and the figures are being shot, assembled, and painted right now, so they should be ready for your consumption sometime in mid-March. The third Monsterpocalypse set is winding down its design cycle and preparing to be sent off to China for preproduction. The fourth is in the queue and being playtested.

We have heard a lot of good things out there about Monsterpocalypse rocking the tables at the game stores. We at Privateer are taking that feedback seriously. We have plans for new sets stretching into 2011 and beyond. One could say that making monsters is our business, and business is good!

As we move into the holiday season, remember there is no better gift that you can give your friends and family than a Monsterpocalypse Starter Set, and there is no activity more important than participating in a Monsterpocalypse Organized Play event. (Some might say that love and community service, respectively, fill those roles, but that mushy stuff is yesterday’s news—today’s headlines are all about Monsterpocalypse!) More Starter Sets have been printed and are being sent out to distributors and stores as we speak. More OP kits have also been produced and will be appearing at a store near you in the coming weeks.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, people!

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Support Kits on the Way!

We’re gearing up to send out the first wave of Monsterpocalypse Support Kits!

What is a Support Kit, you ask? It’s a package of goodies we send to stores every few weeks containing products to use as tournament prizes. Every Monsterpocalypse kit contains a monster Mega form as well as promo units! Each event gets a number of the promo units equal to the number of registered participants signed up for the event—so if everyone registers, everyone will receive a figure. As you can see, registering for the events is very important. If you don’t register, you may get left out of the killer swag!

Our first Monsterpocalypse Support Kit contains Mega Armodax and the promo version of the Hunter or the Explodohawk.

The cool thing about our Monsterpocalypse promo units is they all have the Cloak ability, so we’ve produced cool shadow variants of the units. Though these units cost more to play, Cloak gives them another level of protection—and their ability to avoid blast attacks can really pay off.

The shadow version of Hunter has a pretty nifty application. Because Hunters are long range, they can hang back at a distance from enemy units and pluck them off one at a time. If you can pick up radar you can stretch this out even farther. If set on a far flank, the Hunter can produce 1 Power Die for you by taking an enemy unit off of the map almost every turn. Not many players are willing to dedicate the resources necessary to close the distance with the shadow Hunter and then execute an attack to take him out. Often, inexperienced players will let you pick off their units one by one until the end of the game, essentially converting the A-Dice they paid for those units into P-Dice for your Power Pool. Now that’s a change for the better.

The shadow version of Explodohawk is especially useful when you have to get him across the map to throw himself at the enemy monster. Most Explodohawks spawn, move, and explode, but that’s not always possible. The extra protection Cloak provides is sometimes enough to get the shadow Explodohawk to where he can lay his smack down on the enemy monster. An extra 1 damage during a unit phase never hurts, I’ll tell you what!

If you want to get your hands on these shadow units, though, you need to register for your events. It doesn’t take long and the benefits are obvious. So go out there and register to play!

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