Monsters Menace the World is a medium-complexity strategy board game where 2-4 players compete using monsters, minions and military to gain the most infamy. This game combines detailed miniatures, bright artwork and streamlined rules to create an exciting and extremely fun player experience.
How to Play
The rules for Monsters Menace the World are fairly straight forward though the individual monster, minion and military unit rules can take some getting your head around.
Monsters Menace the World is a medium-complexity strategy board game where 2-4 players compete using monsters, minions and military to gain the most infamy. This game combines detailed miniatures, bright artwork and streamlined rules to create an exciting and extremely fun player experience.
How to Play
The rules for Monsters Menace the World are fairly straight forward though the individual monster, minion and military unit rules can take some getting your head around.
Players choose one of six monsters. They also control a randomly chosen minion and a set of military units.
The monsters use unique abilities to rampage across a world map in order to stomp cities and military bases, fight other monsters and minions, and gain new mutations from mutation sites. Each of these actions allows players to build up infamy points. Players can also use their minions and military to impede others, stopping them from collecting infamy or even causing them to lose infamy.
By stomping mutation sites, monsters can unlock new abilities, allowing them to become increasingly powerful as the game progresses. Players can also choose to conduct military research, allowing them to unlock new abilities for their military units.
The player with the most infamy points at the end of the game wins.
Miniatures and Artwork
Monsters Menace the World includes six gorgeous miniatures to represent the monsters available to choose. They are detailed and perfect for miniature painting hobbyists. There are also plastic military units which are quite small and not really suitable for painting. While this might seem like a drawback, we found that the smaller military units allow the focus on the board to stay on the monsters while still adding a lovely tactile element. The minions are represented by tokens which is a bit of a shame. We would have loved to see these as miniatures too but appreciate that this would up the price of the game somewhat.
Bright, dynamic artwork is a real feature of this game and makes all the components eye-catching. The rulebook, cards and gameboard have a bold style and a nostalgic feel. The few icons used are intuitive and unobtrusive on the cards so that you have the information you need without being overloaded.
Gameplay
While the rulebook isn’t the easiest to understand, the rules are quite straightforward so once you’ve played a couple of rounds, they become clear.
The monsters are the real star of the show in this game. Each monster has different stats and abilities with the option to unlock additional abilities during play. Understanding, and manipulating, these different abilities, strengths and weaknesses is key to success in gathering infamy points. Each minion also has its own strengths and weaknesses.
We found the minions very variable in terms of their helpfulness. Unlike the monsters, if a minion’s hit points reach 0, they are removed from the game. Minions also generally have a lower number of hit points than monsters. This meant that it felt risky to send minions into certain situations and players needed to balance their helpful abilities against their ‘squishyness’.
One very interesting mechanic was that each of the four different types of military unit have different rules and abilities. Tanks are the simplest; they can only move on land and have relatively high defence and attack stats. Fighter jets can move through land and ocean spaces though they must end their movement on a land space. Rocket launchers only move on land spaces and can perform a pre-emptive attack before the monster attacks. The final unit can be used in one of two ways. Firstly, it can function as a submarine which moves through water spaces and attacks adjacent land spaces. It can also function as a cruise missile which gives the player one powerful attack before it is removed from the game.
The different combinations of monsters, minions and military that players can choose give the game a good amount of replayability. Some monsters work better with certain minions and military units than others which makes finding the best combination a fun reason for playing again. However, the game does feel like it could do with a larger number of monsters to add even more variety to sessions.
We really enjoyed that there were a range of ways to score infamy points. This meant that you could tailor your strategy to your monster’s strengths and weaknesses, and also change it up to suit the way the game is playing out. If your monster isn’t as strong in battles, it can still gain points through stomping cities, military bases and mutation sites. This works particularly well in 3 and 4 player games where you can sneak around collecting infamy points while other players duke it out.
Final Thoughts
There’s something really enjoyable about controlling a monster and rampaging across the world. Fans of Godzilla and other Kaiju movies will love the epic feeling of stomping cities and battling other giant monsters. With multiple ways to score points, players can tailor their strategy to their monster’s strengths, how the game is progressing and to their own preferences with ease. Whilst the game could use some more monster options to boost replayability, the bold design and great miniatures make it a fun addition to any gaming shelf.
