What’s up with those buildings?

One of the first things I’m going to do with this blog is establish a vocabulary. There are a fair number of elements in Monsterpocalypse™ that I want to talk about, but first I think it’s important to establish what is what.

Today I am going to talk about those cool building models. For Pete’s sake, monsters NEED buildings to destroy!

At the end of 2007, I found myself cruising the web checking out this and that. I stopped by privateerpress.com and saw the Monsterpocalypse announcement on the day it launched. I was intrigued but a little puzzled about how well a miniatures game about “big monsters” could play out. A few months later some pictures from the New York Toy Fair leaked. In those pictures I saw some of the monsters stomping around a map with buildings placed on it.

My imagination instantly took off. Those buildings really made the game pop off the table! Somewhere along the line the word came out that the monsters could destroy the terrain. “Holy crap!” I thought to myself. “Monsters love eating buildings!” I started trying to guess how the game would play. My thoughts included a format where players would rampage through a city, destroy civil defense forces and buildings to power up, and then unleash the fury of high-powered abilities and attacks against one another.

Lo and behold, I was almost right.

Upon perusing the rules, I saw that the guys at Privateer had produced something close to my desires, with a few twists and additions that were better than I could imagine. Those mild manner buildings actually have some pretty awesome game effects. Each building has a defense stat, which is used to attack the building, and an energy stat, which gives your monster power dice when destroyed. Power dice add to your dice pools and are used to produce those power attacks I talked about in my last post.

When you play a game of Monsterpocalypse, you bring with you between two and 12 buildings. Each player alternates placing these buildings, and setting up the city has some tactical aspects to it. Some building have special effects that trigger when you destroy them, others have abilities when you secure them (when your smaller figures stand beside the building to “protect” it).

Since most attacks in Monsterpocalypse result in only one point of damage, players need to look for ways to add extra damage to their attacks. One of the major tricks is to use your power attacks to throw, smash, or slam your opponent’s monster into a building. Since collisions with buildings result in an extra point of damage, and the destruction of most buildings results in a hazard that can cause another point of damage, you can easily triple your damage output by knocking your opponent’s monster into a building.

That makes me want to recreate the action I see in all of the kaiju films. Those films just get so much better when set in a city with the monsters knocking one another into buildings and the fireworks going off.

Monsterpocalypse creates some great mind’s eye visuals. The game is built monster-centric with rules and bonuses that encourage players to take actions right out of their favorite kaiju movie battles. Many games start with a monster destroying a Skyscraper to load up on power dice, and then charging across the map to throw the other monster through a TV Station and into a Nuclear Power Plant, which results in a mini-Chernobyl radioactive hazard. That player just delivered four points of damage to his opponent’s monster!

I can actually picture some dudes, dressed in big rubber suits, throwing each other into movie prop buildings with the firecracker special effects going off all over the place. You will not find action like this anywhere else!

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