Intro to Monsterpocalypse and Back to Flames of War

Sometimes when you are working on a project and can't seem to make any progress on it, its probably good idea to put it aside and work on something else for a while. This article is the something else to the project I wanted to finish before anything else on my blog. That project was suppose to be a followup youtube hobby progression video to the ones I did a few years ago, starting by summarize my current hobby. For some reason I could never finish the audio of what I wanted to say. The sad thing is the information I wanted to say is already outdated. If you follow my blog for any amount of time, you already know my hobby plans changes remarkable fast. 3 things happened two weeks ago that changed my hobby plans. This article will talk about two of them, starting with the game that was the catalysis for everything else, Monsterpocaylpse.

Tracy's Monster Collection

Monsterpocalypse is a miniature game about Kaiju (giant monsters) meeting up with giant robots and other giant creatures from media using a city as a ring as they destroy buildings trying to hurt each other, with a few planes and tanks thrown in to annoy them like gnats. Version 2 was just release last fall. I never got into nor played version 1 of Monsterpocalypse. This was mainly due to it being a collectible game. Like Collectible Card Games (CCGs) like Magic the Gathering, Monsterpocalypse version 1 was sold in random packs. You never knew what you were going to get. While I could accept that practice from CCGs, thought of doing that with more expensive miniatures was a non starter for me. Version 1 also came pre-assembled pre-painted, which for the younger me at the time would have been fine. Today pre-painted miniatures would be a reason for me to NOT get involved. In any case Monsterpocalypse version 2 is more like standard miniature games in that you know what you are purchasing and the models needs to be painted. Two weeks ago Tracy suddenly called me up to show me a demo of it. We haven't talk since the beginning of Summer so I was surprised to hear from him. It was a fairly easy game to learn and Tracy have at least one of everything that is currently available. I quickly found mechanics that I loved and wanted to make force around. Fortunately, the force construction rules are really simple.

The first thing you pick when building a force is decide what agenda to used. Currently the agendas are Protectors (the good guys) and the Destroyers (the bad guys). Each agenda is made up of several factions. When making a force, everything you pick needs to be from the same agenda though some models may have rules that is only beneficial to their own faction. Standard games have 2 monsters, up to 20 units and 6 to 12 buildings per player. Monsters are the core of your force and are unique. That means you have to pick 2 different monsters from the same agenda in a standard game and you win the game by defeating both of your opponents monsters. Units are the smaller models of your force like planes and tanks. Units are used to control the battlefield and setup advantages for your monsters. Units don't start on the map, they need to be spawned in. When units are destroyed, you can just spawned the model back in the next time you can spawn units. In this way, you have unlimited units to spawn, your choice of 20 units is picking what options you have available to spawn. This opens the door for deep strategies as the game ages. I could see players having one unit in their list that they don't use in a lot of their games yet it is there in case the right scenario comes up. Buildings play an unique role in your list and the game itself. Both players build the game map by placing their buildings one at a time, taking turns. Game maps have spots mark for where buildings need to go. This makes building the map a mini-game of itself as you want to set it up to give yourself as much of an advantage as possible while your opponent does the same. There are two types of buildings: apartments which have a defense 5, no limit to how many you can bring and no special rules; and special buildings which have a defense of 6 or 7, a limit of 4 per type and a wide range of special rules. Some building special abilities require you to have 3 units around it first before you can use it. Here is some of Tracy's buildings...

I decided to build a protectors force around Zor-Maxim and teleport rules. I first pick Zor-Maxim because I thought he could teleport around the battlefield only to realize that his ability only works on units, not himself. I stuck with him because I could envision controlling the battlefield by teleporting all over the place. Shadow Sun Industries is a building that interacts with models with the teleport rule. That's why the first two things I own of Monsterpocalypse are Zor-Maixm and Shadow Sun Industries. I haven't yet played a game utlizing my theme because Tracy doesn't own what I need to test it. My core force is going to need multiple Shadow Gate and Shadow Sun Industries. Once I have that, I can play a game to see if my theme is viable and what other units and Monster I want to add to my force.

While learning how to play Monsterpocalypse, Tracy inform me that my Flames of War plans needed to change. My plan was to slowly collect models that I could use in a force from my Berlin list and evenually go to tournaments. I was aware that something about Late War was coming out this Summer but I didn't know any of the details. Little did I know that previous lists, like my Berlin list were becoming invaild with the new Late War book. That makes building a Berlin force for tournaments kind of pointless. A little frustrating that a lot of my recent purchases were from late Late LATE War are now useless until Battlefront comes up with new rules for them, in 3 or 4 years! On the bright side, my recent (beginning of the year) purchase included a box of Panther tanks which can make up over 50% of a force in the new system. Between that and the new plastic men, it shouldn't cost that much to finally have a playable army. I have several big ticket expanses to deal with so it might be closer to the end of the year before that playable army becomes real.