As an avid kaiju fan, I wish someone had introduced me to the game Monsterpocalypse sooner. I have been playing tabletop games and obsessed with kaiju for as long as I can remember. And once I started playing it, I could not stop—it’’s hard to want to play anything else! I am part of several kaiju communities, and I am writing this because I know there are kaiju fans, both new and old, who are actually looking for this exact game. If that’s you, you may not know this yet, but Monsterpocalypse is the game you never knew you always wanted. The game is a kaiju movie, and you are in command of the action. To explain why I love this game so much, we have to take a trip down memory lane—or, in this case, Obliteration Boulevard.
As a young kid, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and great-grandparents. Searching through old attic boxes was nothing less than a treasure hunt for an adventurous kid like me. Every crumpled box was a forgotten time capsule, full of ancient dust-covered books and prehistoric VHS tapes. It was among those sacred relics I discovered my love for the classics. I found myself dreaming up my own movies and my own monsters. I would fill pages of notebooks with drawings of my own kaiju. I would get army men, action figures, robot toys and painstakingly craft battles. I would use fireworks, sparklers, smoke bombs, silly string, and slime to create the most extravagant effects a kid could dream up.
As adults, it’s simple human nature for us to look for ways to fulfill our childhood dreams again. These days, it seems like the theaters are full of nostalgia that’s ready to pull us back to those fantasy-filled times.
2021 came in with a thunderous roar, essentially declaring itself the year of the kaiju. If you like to see big monsters smash the daylights out of each other while completely obliterating a major city, you’re in luck! Kicking off this year, we are getting reimagined classics galore. On the little screen, I never would have imagined that I’d see my favorite Lovecraftian monsters come to life in their own tv show. And soon, the kaiju heavyweights of my childhood are clashing on the big screen! If you follow these franchises as closely as I do, you probably collect monster figures as well. But I wasn’t a very good “collector” as a kid. I couldn’t keep anything in its box. I wanted to pull it out, paint it, play with it, and indulge myself in the worlds I loved to get lost in. As an adult, I’m no different.
That’s why my inner child went nuts when I discovered Monsterpocalypse. It allows me to play out a monster movie every single day. My family has added Monsterpocalypse to our game night rotation, and it never disappoints. We pop some popcorn, put on a movie soundtrack, and play out the end of the world.
My daughter Eve may only be nine years old, but she will put a kaiju-sized footprint on your heart. I picked up Monsterpocalypse knowing the big kid in me wanted a way to play with all of my toys. I should have guessed the actual kid in my house would also be excited to play a game where she got to use monsters to smash stuff. She likes to shout out their names and tell them to do their attacks when rolling the dice. “Nova, Blast attack now!” She may not realize it, but playing Monsterpocalypse has enriched her academic life. The constant exercise of doing dice math, solving game problems, and planning strategies has helped shape her into a sharp-witted competitor. Painting minis with me on painting night has helped her grasp of color theory, giving her an early start on advanced art theories. Her math teacher noticed she was doing better on timed tests after she acquired a greater interest in games.It has also given her something tangible to be motivated to keep her grades up. If she gets good grades, she gets more models to paint and play with. Now she watches her favorite big robot or super ninja show and then wants to grab her dice and play. I hear there is a saying around the game tables: Introduce kids to games when they’re young, and they will never have enough money to buy drugs.
One of my favorite things to do with the family on game night is to watch a kaiju movie or TV show and then go play a game with those monsters. And right now is the perfect time to play with my favorite monsters. My first Monsterpocalypse Faction was the Lords of Cthul. My wife, Clare, has since claimed my masters of madness as her own. I have no issue with this, of course, as it’s the perfect excuse to buy more models. Since she was enjoying my Cthul, I switched to Protectors and am now championing Terrasaurs. Terra Kahn is one of my all-time favorite monsters, and given the kaiju movie premiere coming up this spring, it should be no wonder I want to play with the big lizard.
In the end, my favorite thing about discovering Monsterpocalypse is simple: it doesn’t matter if you’re 9 or 90, the kid in all of us wants a way to play with our toys. Monsterpocalypse is a fun way for the whole family to play together. So, if you’re sitting around at home and need a better game than checkers to spice up your game night, play Monsterpocalypse. If you’re looking at all of the sweet kaiju toys still in the box and you can’t touch them, play Monsterpocalypse. And if the state of the world’s got you down and you just want to destroy it, definitely play Monsterpocalypse.
