Mayhem On Monster Island

'Pacific Rim: Uprising' opened last week and, of course, I rushed off to see it. You'll get no spoilers here, but suffice to say I loved it (as did the rest of my family). It's a little different in tone to the first film, but delivers exactly what you'd expect; monsters and jaegers beating each other up. That's all I ask for.

Anyway, it put me in the mood for some more giant monster gaming, so last night we got out Mighty Monsters at the Gong Garage Gamers. We went for a six-player free-for-all. The objective was an energy crystal in the centre of the table; at the end of each turn the closest monster to the crystal got a VP (all monsters if they were equidistant). Then the crystal teleported 1D6" in a random direction. This made the game a little more fluid than the normal pile-on in the centre of the table. If I ran it again I'd have the crystal move a little further in order to force more movement, but it worked for the purposes of last night's game.

After a quick rundown of the rules for the several players who'd not played before, we set to. Each player selected one monster or mech; I provided eighteen models, from Pacific Rim jaegers, to Godzilla friends and foes to home-brew designs. Three players chose jaegers; Kannika went for Crimson Typhoon, Geoff for Cherno Alpha and Kaleb for Gipsy Danger. The rest of us went for classic monsters; Caesar selected Godzilla, John tried Gamera and I went for Gigan.

Each player started in a corner or at the centre of an edge. Godzilla and Gamera were the first to approach each other, Godzilla scoring a hit with his radioactive-breath as they approached.

(You can just see the crystal bottom-left)

Gipsy Danger appeared, and attacked Gamera. There then commenced a series of the most pathetic combat exchanges you'll ever see in a game of Mighty Monsters, ans both player commenced rolling a whole series of ones and completely failing to do anything to each other. The whole embarrassing exchange ended with the jaeger attempting a kick and falling over.

Gipsy Danger got up, got hit and fell over again in a different place. Gamera jumped on the mech, but managed to mess that up as well.

Meanwhile Godzilla and Gamera fought each other. Gamera grappled the big lizard to bring his chest-mounted buzz-saw into play (seriously).

And here's a picture showing all of the participants in action. The brown counters are boulders, by the way; I managed to forget to bring my box of rocks I usually use for such things.

Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon exchanged some blows; the big Russian jaeger took a hit from the Chinese mech's plasma gun, but scored in close combat by being bigger, heavier and stronger. A slam smacked the red jaeger into the wrestling Godzilla and Gigan knocking them all down. This secured Cherno Alpha a turn closest to the crystal.

The crystal moved so that it was on top of an inaccessible rock. Unless you were Gigan, of course, who had the ability to teleport. And did (not shown).

The first casualty. By now most of us were taking plenty of hits, but Cherno Alpha was the first to fall, its power systems completely fried by a breath attack from Gamera.

Godzilla vs Gipsy Danger. Come on; you'd pay good money to see that film. I would.

The crystal returned to the centre of the table, and three of us managed to get in close enough to score points. But we were all on our last legs by this stage.

Godzilla was the next to fall. Attacked by Gamera he was whittled down by a series of bites, claw attacks and finally a powerful kick.

Gamera was out of the running in terms of points, and Gipsy Danger as well, by virtue of spending a lot of the game knocked over. This left Gigan and Crismson Typhoon facing off. Despite serious injuries Gigan drove the mech back by smashing a boulder into its sensors, teleported close to the crystal, and then used his head-laser to finish the jaeger off.

At that point we called the game because of time constraints. Gigan had very much won on points, although I think at some stages in the game we were having so much fun beating each other up that we forgot to record them, so who really knows who won?

In the cold light of day it's hard to remember all of the specific incidents of the game, but everyone seemed to have fun and all of the designs seemed to work OK. The various options in combat seemed to give people the feel of the various films we were familiar with, and that's important. The game reflects the genre nicely. We had a few reservations about the Shell ability that Gamera had, which seems to offer a very powerful defence for a reasonable cost and minimal 'risk'. But we have a possible idea for fixing that which I will try in another game.