Play Testing: Kaiju Rampage

Oh no! A giant monster is terrorizing down town Tokyo, there is only one hope: Super Size Steve Irwin...

 

 

Sensibly I would stick to one genre of wargames and expand my collection of miniatures and scenery. I am often accused of many things, but rarely sense. Like, I suspect, most wargamers my enthusiasm for new genres is only tempered by time and money.

It makes a nice change then to find a new game that only requires one mini to play, and a pre-painted one for £6 or so at that. Ken Lewis's Kaiju Rampage is one such game. It does require some scenery, but a) cardstock buildings do just fine and b) Jordan sorted all that out. 

 

We were playing Kaiju Rampage, a game of giant monsters fighting across a city, smashing buildings and generally causing mayhem. It is still in play-testing phase, and the book was somewhat disjointed, as is to be expected at this stage.
 

 

I had some doubts as to how strategic a game with one mini per side could be (you can have more but we wanted to keep it simple as this was our first game) but the fighting is complex enough to provide a number of options.





 

Steve Erwin kept using his special control power to flip the monster around, thus giving a bonus on combat.

Monsters are built from the ground up, with complete freedom to choose the initial stats as well as a number of powers and attacks. Not appreciating exactly how the system worked neither of us built our monsters as well as we should, in hindsight they should have had more attacks.

 

It took a while to get used to the system, but once we did it flowed remarkably smoothly for a system still in development, no doubt helped by the fact that this is a variant on another rules system. The movement particularly I found interesting, we have been asked not to go into details about the rules, so for now all I shall say is that it was restrictive enough to make you plan your moves, and means that even on a 3' table there was an opportunity for your enemy to evade your grasp and spit venom into your poor Australian face.

 

Expect to see more of Kaiju Rampage soon, Steve Irwin needs avenging...

 



 

Coming Next Week:

 

Playing Around With A Vinyl Cutter