Moongha Invaders Review

Michael

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Posted by Michael on Oct 7, 2015

I first played Martin Wallace’s Moongha Invaders (colorfully subtitled “Mad Scientists and Atomic Monsters Take Over the World) back in 2010, when it was first released as a painfully limited edition that was in and out of print before many folks even knew it existed. It quickly shot up in value among collectors and it became a sort of “Holy Grail” item for some. A Kickstarter was launched for a reprint way back in 2012 and after many delays it has finally come to fruition in the new edition that is now currently available at retail. I was quite excited to get my hands on the game again- I raved about it and played a friend’s copy several times but I could never find a copy for purchase at anywhere near what I considered a reasonable price.

In some ways, this is a very atypical Martin Wallace game, so those expecting something as rigid and dryly economical as Age of Steam or Brass might be disappointed. But in other ways, it is very much a Martin Wallace game reminiscent of some of his earlier conflict-oriented designs that married more Eurogame-styled mechanics to a greater emphasis on setting, narrative and theme. As you might guess from the title, this outing is a pulp science fiction blowout, drawing inspiration from monster movies to couch its dudes-on-a-map gameplay. The goal of the game, effectively, is to cause as much destruction across the world as you can with your monsters. I can get with that.

Each player has a set of identical monsters. There is the sidekick-like Kidoo, who can perform a tag-along attack with a monster he’s buddied up with. Drakoors are essentially vampires that you want to keep hidden because they score points at the end of the game. The Spectoor is a mystical tentacle-thing that helps your monsters move through his mind control powers. Shagoo finds hidden monsters so you can do things like drop nuclear bomb on them. The Bloob multiplies. Moogre is kind of the “good guy” monster and he earns points for destroying other monsters. And the robotic Mechoor is the piece de resistance of rampaging.

You sit down to a map of the world zoned by major cities. There really isn’t any set up, because you kind of set it up as you play- which is sort of a problem that I’ll get to a few lines down. On your turn, you select an action from six boxes that are seeded each round. You can take a Create/Heal marker, which you can place on a creature box on your side of the board to do exactly what it says on the tin. Each monster has a cost that you have to meet, so it’s sort of a gradual process to get them on the board. And when you do, they arrive in the city of your choice in a “hidden” state. You can also choose a “move” action, which is vital later in the game because it is also how you can re-hide a monster that has either been exposed or busy doing- or taking- damage.

The attack action is also self-explanatory, but there is a neat element here whereby you can store attack markers on a monster to effectively charge them up, causing them to roll more dice in an attack. Monsters can attack other monsters, which is always fun, and they can also attack jointly-controlled military units and in fact must do so in order to attack the cities they are defending. But usually you want to spend those attack markers to smash the cities and place your rubble markers on them, because that’s the chief way to win the game.

Speaking of the military, there are infantrymen, tanks, a plane and a nuke. There are always infantrymen available, but tanks, planes and nukes depend on a die roll to seed their appropriate boxes at the beginning of a round. If you pick one of these, you put them in any city and it, along with any other military units there, attack exposed monsters. There are also hero units which are more or less vampire hunters. You place these guys out and they can expose monsters as well as attack Drakoors. Normally, only other Drakoors may only be attacked by others of their kind.

So this sounds really, really awesome doesn’t it?

Well, it kind of is. Sometimes.The monster battles are always fun. Smashing a city in one go- they can only take so much damage- is always a cause for a fist-pump. Rooting out opponent’s monsters and destroying them is a hoot. And I really love how the game captures that element of classic monster movies where the creature shows up, performs its property damage duties, the army shows up and shoots at it, and it skulks away to hide again. It really captures some fun things about its subject matter. And the charging up thing is kind of brilliant, encouraging you to risk holding off in exchange for potentially more damage.

But there are some problems with the setup and the resolution. This is not at all a quick-playing, fast-and-loose punch-up like King of Tokyo or even the venerable Monsters Menace America. This is a weirdly measured design with a staggering pace that seems like it takes too long to get to the good stuff. Remember, each turn you choose just one action and there is nothing on the board at the outset. So it takes you four turns just to get Mechoor on the board, and then you’ll want to spend a couple of turns to charge him up to possibly do damage. That is, if someone doesn’t find and destroy him before you can actually do anything with him.

The action selection mechanic isn’t metered quite right for this kind of game. I get that Wallace wanted it to be a “one action per turn” deal to keep it simple, but the result is a sense of fractional action. Mind, when it gets good and there’s a big fight, dice are rolling and friends are screaming then it can be really good. But there’s a lot of dead air in this design, and the fact that the players set up the game state from zero as they go along doesn’t help.

I’m also not very fond of the victory conditions. For all of the die-rolling, nuking bluster, Moongha Invaders turns out to be an almost old fashioned area control game. At the end, every city space is tallied up and whoever has the most rubble markers of their color gets points, the second most gets points and so forth. There are also one or two “goal” cities handed out to each player at the beginning that give bonuses for protecting them, and they pay out a bonus based on how little damage is on them. It’s an incentive to use the military and encourage PVP that works, but it almost feels like a distraction. As does the deal with the Drakoors, who get points for being on the board and isolated from other monsters.

This is a three to four player game, but there is a set of two player rules included. It is not a variant. It is a completely different game played on the reverse side of the board and using just some of the components and a deck of cards. It’s a simple grid-based skirmish game where one player controls a team of monsters, the other the hero units from the main game. Each monster and hero has special powers, et cetera, and the aim of the game is for the hero player to stop the monster player from killing everyone or smashing the buildings. The heroes can search for equipment in the buildings to give them an edge. It’s a nice touch to include a playable game for two in the box, but it also isn’t very good. It feels like an outdated magazine game from 1982.Best to view this side of the game as a value-add rather than a selling point.

I’m not only disappointed with this edition of Moongha Invaders, I’m also questioning what it was that I saw in 2010 that seemed so great at the time. I think in 2010 this game felt a lot more unusual than it does today. Back then, games with this kind of genre subject matter were still stuck in this very baroque, overblown stage and Moongha Invaders felt like a throwback to more traditional “Ameritrash” style games despite originating from one of Eurogames’ biggest and most beloved designers. I really liked the visual styling of the original edition, which had a distinct old school charm and a striking black and white comics look. Unfortunately, this edition completely eschews all of that.

The production of this game isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s terribly misdirected. The illustrations are fine, but the execution of the product is a mistake. The miniatures- which are replacing counters here- do nothing to add to the game. They are cheap-looking, cheap-feeling and in bright, primary colors. Pretty much every figure in my box was severely warped. What’s worse is that their functionality is poor. The map boxes are really too small for the pieces. Once you’ve got a couple of monsters, a couple of counters and a pile of rubble tokens in one, you’re spilling over from Los Angeles to Rio De Janeiro. Halfway through the game, the board is just a mess. I can’t say that the noxious “made in China” fumes that greet me every time I open the box are especially endearing, either.