Preview: Kaiju City

This past weekend I was at G-Fest XIX in Rosemont, IL.  It was a fantastic con and I got the opportunity to break out some wonderful kaiju (giant monster) themed games including King of Tokyo by IELLO, Monsterpocalypse by Privateer Press and a new game currently funding on Kickstarter called Kaiju City by Bonsai Entertainment. I had backed Kaiju City a few weeks before G-Fest and was excited to learn that I would have to opportunity to not only play the game, but meet it's artist, Frank Parr.  Here are a few of my thoughts on the preview copy they had available.

A mock-up of the proposed box art and some of the components

Components:  Since this was only a prototype, I can't go into great detail about the components, but the artwork they have planned for the game is phenomenally good.  The monsters are all unique and suitably fearsome-looking while the city tiles are varied and the military tiles pay fitting tribute to the armed forces that consistently get crushed in damn near every kaiju film ever made.

Gameplay: Kaiju City has players choose whether to play as the monsters or the city itself.  I know what you're thinking - who would ever want to play as the city and why can't the monsters fight each other?  Well, simmer down because even though I had the same thought going in, I was pleasantly surprised with the stalwart human defenders.  The city player will draw tiles, build up resources and bring military might to bear in a desperate effort to kill 4 of the rampaging monsters.  However, the monsters only need to carve a path of destruction through the city in such a way that no new tiles can be placed in order to achieve victory.  There ends up being a solid amount of depth in placing city tiles as the defender and moving your monsters around to destroy them as the attacker.

Rules: The rules for Kaiju City are nice and simple.  The city player draws tiles each turn to add to the city which starts as a 4x4 grid of unique tiles.  Resources generated by these tiles are used to build new areas of the city each turn.  Meanwhile the monster player will have control of 4 monsters, each with unique abilities that they must leverage in order to destroy the city and prevent the defenders from building new areas.  The iconography on both the tiles and monster record sheets conveniently displays all the necessary information without cluttering up the amazing artwork, so players will always know at a glance what their options are and which monsters are the most threatening or which city tiles look tastiest.

I couldn't resist including the art for Lukar - my favorite monster!

Overall: Unfortunately, I didn't get nearly enough opportunities to play the demo of Kaiju City while I was at G-Fest, but based on watching a handful of games in addition to my own I have to say that this is a refreshing, beautiful and just plain fun game.  The human player will have some tense moments where they'll have to decide which city tiles will be most advantageous to play that turn and the monster player will have to carefully coordinate where they move their kaiju in order to inflict the most mayhem.  Hopefully Bonsai Entertainment will be able to deliver on some amazing components if and when they get funded because everything else in this game is as solid as Gamera's shell.