Imhotepthewise
Explorer
On Saturday, November 16, 2013, I attended Elliscon at H H Ellis Technical High School in Danielson CT USA. I ran Ganesha Games Mighty Monsters, since the crowd at Elliscon is younger. I do have a couple more of Ganesha’s games, but I will play them another time.
I shopped around for some small monsters, since my D&D miniatures were too small for my liking and I had a few VERY OLD (lead) Battletech mechs that I wanted to use that are almost 50mm tall with their bases. I found some cool minis at the flea market that I found out later were Gormiti figures made in Italy. This made the rules and minis both an Italian event! Any monster figures you have that are about 50mm or smaller will work well for this game. I plan on taking some basic dinosaurs and use epoxy and stuff to trick them up for more figures later.
I had three grown ups and two kids playing, and they quickly got the concept of the game and jumped right in. The rules are very tight and easy to explain. The concept of rolling dice for actions soaked in and it did not take them long to make conscious decisions of what body segments to start with and how many dice to roll depending on what they wanted to do.
The summary of the mechanics is as follows. A monster has several body segments, head, body, arms, legs, etc. The player dices for actions in each segment. Three successes means three actions. You can throw less dice. If you throw two failures, you let the next monster go. You can keep rolling and acting in each segment till you roll the two failures, you run out of body segments, or choose to stop. Success in actions is throwing high on 1d6 with modifiers against another 1d6 with modifiers. Beating the other roll is good, doubling it is better, tripling it is best. Rolling half of what the other guy rolls is generally bad.
It was a few turns in before I explained about Powerful and Very Powerful attacks. Cautious about this at first, they did start to use it as the damage stacked up.
I made a couple of rulings about line of sight and difficult terrain. I made a couple of calls about Cripple result. Mostly, I was not essential to the running of this game as a referee, I could have easily played with them and everything would have run smoothly. I left to take a photograph near the end of the game, and they finished up while I was out doing that themselves.
What I like about this game.
The author of this game has a tight rules set that is simple to explain and get a game going and have the players get right into the meat of what makes this game unique. The choices made when rolling the action dice are the most essential part of winning. The math is easy enough for young children to do themselves. It is not easy to take out a monster with one shot, so the chance of being bumped out early is low. Visually, it is pretty easy and cheap to make a game table that is appealing to play.
The buy in to this game is cheap, $8 for the PDF rules, a couple of figure you probably have hanging around, some building blocks or LEGOs for buildings, and you have a game to play.
What I didn’t like about this game.
Unless I don’t understand it correctly, weapons and such mounted in the body segment are not touchable for Cripples by the rules as written. I house ruled to allow this, so it is not really a problem.
The use of the word Maim is not great in a game that you would play with children. This may be a result of translation from the original Italian. There is a reason most operas are in Italian and not English. Italian is a much more civilized language. I have house ruled this as Specific Attack, and all is well.
Summary.
We had a great time playing this game on Saturday. That, in itself, is the greatest endorsement for a game. I will run this game again, and am encouraged to use the other rulesets I’ve bought from Ganesha Games. Please support this small press company, their products are well worth your money.
I shopped around for some small monsters, since my D&D miniatures were too small for my liking and I had a few VERY OLD (lead) Battletech mechs that I wanted to use that are almost 50mm tall with their bases. I found some cool minis at the flea market that I found out later were Gormiti figures made in Italy. This made the rules and minis both an Italian event! Any monster figures you have that are about 50mm or smaller will work well for this game. I plan on taking some basic dinosaurs and use epoxy and stuff to trick them up for more figures later.
I had three grown ups and two kids playing, and they quickly got the concept of the game and jumped right in. The rules are very tight and easy to explain. The concept of rolling dice for actions soaked in and it did not take them long to make conscious decisions of what body segments to start with and how many dice to roll depending on what they wanted to do.
The summary of the mechanics is as follows. A monster has several body segments, head, body, arms, legs, etc. The player dices for actions in each segment. Three successes means three actions. You can throw less dice. If you throw two failures, you let the next monster go. You can keep rolling and acting in each segment till you roll the two failures, you run out of body segments, or choose to stop. Success in actions is throwing high on 1d6 with modifiers against another 1d6 with modifiers. Beating the other roll is good, doubling it is better, tripling it is best. Rolling half of what the other guy rolls is generally bad.
It was a few turns in before I explained about Powerful and Very Powerful attacks. Cautious about this at first, they did start to use it as the damage stacked up.
I made a couple of rulings about line of sight and difficult terrain. I made a couple of calls about Cripple result. Mostly, I was not essential to the running of this game as a referee, I could have easily played with them and everything would have run smoothly. I left to take a photograph near the end of the game, and they finished up while I was out doing that themselves.
What I like about this game.
The author of this game has a tight rules set that is simple to explain and get a game going and have the players get right into the meat of what makes this game unique. The choices made when rolling the action dice are the most essential part of winning. The math is easy enough for young children to do themselves. It is not easy to take out a monster with one shot, so the chance of being bumped out early is low. Visually, it is pretty easy and cheap to make a game table that is appealing to play.
The buy in to this game is cheap, $8 for the PDF rules, a couple of figure you probably have hanging around, some building blocks or LEGOs for buildings, and you have a game to play.
What I didn’t like about this game.
Unless I don’t understand it correctly, weapons and such mounted in the body segment are not touchable for Cripples by the rules as written. I house ruled to allow this, so it is not really a problem.
The use of the word Maim is not great in a game that you would play with children. This may be a result of translation from the original Italian. There is a reason most operas are in Italian and not English. Italian is a much more civilized language. I have house ruled this as Specific Attack, and all is well.
Summary.
We had a great time playing this game on Saturday. That, in itself, is the greatest endorsement for a game. I will run this game again, and am encouraged to use the other rulesets I’ve bought from Ganesha Games. Please support this small press company, their products are well worth your money.
