Knights of the Cardboard Castle

One of the earliest multiplayer PC game experiences I can recall was with Rampage. This was a port of an arcade game first manufactured by Midway in 1986. Up to three players could simultaneously play on a single machine, each taking control of one of the three giant monsters, and they competed for the most points by razing buildings, eating people and stomping on all manner of vehicles while fending off the armed forces. It was a very simple game, but the novelty value of playing the evil monsters for once made it very entertaining and it was very satisfying to pop open buildings to see what’s inside.

I had Rampage in mind when Sean showed us his cheaply acquired copy of the out of print Monsters Menace America. That it should be a good game was something I knew would be too much to hope for, but given its theme, this was most certainly a game that I needed to play at least once. It even comes with an impressive set of painted miniatures representing all the usual giant monsters: Godzilla, King Kong, a Giant Eyeball, etc. It’s a pity they didn’t use an Ultraman-clone in place of their Mecha figure. All the action takes place on a large hex-map of North America, representing the various cities and military bases ripe for destruction. What could go wrong?

As it turned out, plenty, because as cool as the theme and the components are, the rules are so phoned-in that it’s barely much of a game at all. Each player takes control of one of the giant monsters and also one of the branches of the armed forces of the United States, i.e. the Army, the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines. This means that during your turn, you not only get to move your chosen monster around stomping on stuff but also direct your military units to attack your opponents’ monsters.

The monsters will basically be running around stomping on the  sites marked on the map for the benefits each site confers. So stomping on cities lets you increase your life, from a couple of points for small towns to three dices’ worth for a metropolis like New York. Some sites are marked “Mutation” which lets you draw from the Mutation deck, randomly giving you a weird new power. Another type of site yields Infamy tokens. You can spend them in combat to get extra attacks. Finally, you can also stomp on military bases. This permanently reduces the units that branch of the military can deploy onto the map.

You can only successfully stomp a site if there are no military units on it so you need to wipe them all out first. Combat is handled through dice. The monster attacks first, unless there are special rules in effect, and gets three attacks. Rolling any result equaling or exceeding the Defense of the unit means a successful hit and destruction of the unit. The surviving units then get to fight back and must roll against the monster’s Defense, doing a variable amount of damage according to their unit type. This goes on for a total of two rounds and if the monster hasn’t killed off all the military units by then, it has been driven away and can’t stomp anything.

In the unlikely event that a monster’s health is reduced to zero, it is simply resurrected at Hollywood where it is put on display as an attraction. You’re then forced to stay put while you heal up every turn until you’re healthy enough to go rampaging again. Successfully stomped site gets a stomped token on it so it can’t be stomped on again. This also acts as a timer as the game ends when you run out of stomp tokens.

In the military units phase, you decide either to deploy units at the appropriate bases for your branch of the military or to draw a special card. Only Shan drew these cards, so I didn’t get to see many of them, but as you might expect these give various bonuses to the pitifully outmatched troops. The most exciting part is getting to control one of the two special military units which are the only things coming close to matching the monsters’ power. Naturally, you also get to move your units around to direct them against the monster of your choice and hope that they survive for long enough to actually do some damage.

When you run out of stomping tokens, all of the monsters are magically teleported to the same location where they get it to fight it out between themselves to prove who is the King of Beasts. This fight uses the same combat rules as before so it’s just a dice fest. Fights are only ever between two monsters so in our game, Sean’s monster waited politely while Shan and I settled our differences. After her monster had defeated mine, she then gained back health equal to the amount I had at the beginning of the fight to help balance the health she had lost. Whoever is left standing, and in our case, it was Shan thanks to some mighty lucky rolls, is declared the victor.

Each monster has slightly different characteristics and starting locations on the map, which gives the game some variety but generally the best thing to do is always pretty obvious. You just pump your own monster up as much as possible for the endgame fight and to do as much damage as possible to your fellow monsters with your military units. Ironically, I think that the differences between the military branches are more significant. Cruise missiles are far and away the best unit and their disadvantage that they last for one attack only hardly matters, given that most units don’t even survive long enough to attack once. The map also feels unbalanced and is too big for its own good. It’s nice that they made an effort to be geographically correct, but the large interior just offers too little scattered across too big an area to be worth it to monsters.

I get that the designers felt that they needed to dumb the game down enough so that it would appeal to kids as well as adults, but there’s barely any game left at all. It just amounts to a lot of moving around for no good reason and a lot of dice rolling. I don’t think Monsters Menace America even properly portrays its theme. Placing stomp tokens on cities is just too easy and doesn’t really convey the fact that they’ve been completely devastated. Maybe restricting the action to the different neighborhoods of a single city would feel more visceral. Then you can visualize the buildings coming down one by one. I also dislike how the game ends with one huge brawl. I’d prefer a simple tweak, such that you win by accumulating Infamy tokens, which don’t do anything, and the final brawl at the end offers a chance to win a big bonus of them. This way, you’d have to balance between making your monster better and actually getting points.

Anyway, as cool as the designers’ original idea was, I’m sorely disappointed that they took the lazy route with the actual design. It’s uninspired, completely conventional and makes no attempt at balance at all. Even the combat is so simple that it gets boring quick. I still think that there’s great fun to be had in giant monsters competing against one another to cause as much havoc as possible, but I’m sorry to say that Monsters Menace America doesn’t deliver it.