I finally got to sit down and play Monsterpocalypse last night, after taking a gaming break over Thanksgiving week.
There’s no getting around it, the game is a bear to teach. It isn’t any one mechanic or rule that is difficult, in fact many of the rules are wonderfully simple, but explaining them all at once is daunting. Teaching the game breaks down into two parts: how the dice pools work is the first, and then the countless abilities of the monsters is the second.
My friend grasped the dice pools right away. Without attempting to explain the whole game, I’ll just say that the heart of the game is learning how to most efficiently balance your action points (called action dice in the game) between your monster’s turn, who does most of the real damage, and your units, who support your monster and irritate your enemy. A monster is only allowed one attack per monster turn, but if you can get in position and make an attack using only a few of your action dice, then you can attack again using what you have left of your action dice on the following turn. That works doubly well if your opponent is stuck with all his action dice allocated to his units in his turn in between your back to back monster turns.
I turned to Universal Head and his player aids to help with the second teaching problem. Each monster has two completely different versions of itself, a regular version and a hyper version (the pissed off version basically). And each version has a host of different attacks, triggers, skills, and abilities. Digesting that is tough. On top of that, you have your units, and each of those has a set of attacks, abilities, and triggers. Out of the box, all the units have very small icons on their bases that you can decipher by using this enormous cheat sheet with itsy-bitsy text, for every power in the game. And buildings too! The game comes with 15+ buildings that each has its own set of abilities. Using the Universal Head aids greatly helps with this by creating cards for each monster that explains in detail what all the icons mean.
The quickest analogy I can think of is that playing Monsterpocalypse for the first time is like playing WoW for the first time, but instead of a 1st level character with 3 abilities, you start at 60th level, with 25 skills and 40 talent points. There are a lot of options. It isn’t a game you can play the first night and really grasp all the things you can do.
But, even on the first night, it can be fun. My friend figured out the basics by the end of the first turn, and on the third turn we had our monsters punching each other in the face. I played a martian tripod named Deimos-9, and he played an enormous Planet Destroyer named Gorghadra. I rolled atrociously and missed on every attack, while he went into hyper mode and turned my fine piece of martian machinery into scrap metal. By the end of the game my opponent had figured out how to use some of the more advanced power attacks, such as plucking my flying saucers out of the air and flinging them into my lumbering tripod. He seemed to like the game and we’re planning on playing it again next week, although I with one change: I’m going to bench Deimos-9 and use the Ares Mothership, which is like going from a Ford to a Ferrari. I can’t wait.
The last thing I have to say about Monsterpocalypse is that it looks great. Even a simple battle like ours has a cinematic quality to it. The buildings, maps, and figures look great to me and always seem to tell a story.
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