The Massive Vs. The Masses

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The Massive Vs. The Masses: Sample Game

This here is something of an experiment. I've found that it's extremely hard to convey how The Massive Vs. The Masses plays through simple summaries, and therefore nobody really knows if they should pick a copy up unless they can actually get their hands on a demo copy to play around with first. It would be nice to be able to just ship an extra copy of the game out to every store interested in carrying it so they could set them up and show them off, but unfortunately, the first production run here is too small and pricey to be able to do that. So instead, we'll have to settle for the next-best thing. I'm going to play out a sample game right here, commenting on it turn by turn. You should come away with a pretty good idea on what it's like to play the game from this, and you might even get some nice strategic tips for when you get a chance to play it for yourself. I don't plan on doing this for all my games, since everything else due out in the next year will be both cheap enough that getting demo sets scattered throughout the world is a more practical option, and, quite frankly, a few are simple enough that I'd be giving the whole thing away. That being said, let's run through a game, shall we?

Our first step is going to be to set the game up, obviously. One of the sample images on the main page shows how the board looks to start off, which I'll back up with a nice overhead diagram. In addition to the pieces, each player is shuffling their decks and drawing their starting hands. Not pictured in these images are the handy little reference sheets we'd presumably have off to the side. In each box is a transparent marker which makes it much easier to keep track of Gamorzilla's HP, just slide it around the big damage track on the sheet. We don't really need to keep track of HP for any of the army's units, because they tend to instantly go from their maximum to none (unless we're doing something crazy like taking two copies of the game and playing an Army Vs. Army match up, or Army and Monster Vs. Army and Monster, or Army Vs. Molemen, you get the idea).

Incidentally, this is as good a place as any to point out that the tiny baggy all the stickers for the Army's units come in is just the right size to store everything we need to set up the game. I find this is a huge time saver personally. Some find it's also nice to mark every building space (grey on the diagram) with a nice solid object (dice work great, as do upside down rubble tokens). It makes it much easier to tell them apart from other space types at a glance, and gives the board a nice 3D look.

Now then, time for the Army to take their first turn. The objective for the Army is to reduce Gamorzilla's HP from 100 to 0 before Gamorzilla has time to kill each of our citizens (the panicky people all over the map). Since the citizens all start up clumped up in convenient bite-sized lumps when we start, the Army always gets to go first, giving us a chance to space them out. It should also be noted that neither our citizens or our Scientist (the beaker) have any means of attacking. We'll have to get some other things on the board to deal with that.

We start our (which is to say the Army's) turn off by drawing a card, bringing us up to a decidedly bloated hand of 11 cards at the moment. We're allowed to play one card per turn, either before or after we start moving everything around. Generally speaking, we want to make that before, so we can do things with what the card gives us, but there are times when moving first is a better call. In any case, today we're starting things off with one of the wordiest cards in the deck: Deploy Armor.

Let's break this one down a bit here. That "or 1 in the back row of Tokyo" bit is in there to indicate that if you're really desperate, either having had your barracks completely destroyed, or just really really needing to get an extra bit of damage done in the corner, you can have a tank come in from off the edge of the map (specifically, into one of the 9 spaces bordering that big brown "Tokyo" label). At the moment though, we aren't going to do that, because we'd like all 3 tanks. The Barracks is a 4 space area, marked in red on our little diagram, and on the real board with crossed guns. We can't actually deploy our tanks into these spaces, since tanks can't ever enter building spaces, so instead, they appear anywhere outside. Every other railroad space (the lines cutting through the board on the diagram) counts as building for our opponent, but for us, they're their own happy little bonus space type, so they're fair game for our tanks.

Now we just need to move all our various units and attack with those that can. We're taking our citizens and scientists and spreading them out around the board to force Gamorzilla to run around as much as possible when killing them all, and moving up our tanks (taking advantage of the railroad movement bonus for one of them) to get within range for our attacks. This is a pretty common opening move, and generally one of the best options if you start with Deploy Armor in hand.

Now it's Gamorzilla's turn. Before doing anything else, we're first drawing a card. There's sometimes something to be said for smashing everything that can hurt you first, but today, we're going to just head on into town and ignore all these little things shooting at us, at least for the time being. Once in place, we'll use another of the wordier cards in the game: Punt.

The short version of how this card works is that we pick a space right next to us, and kick whatever is on it off at someone else. The rest of this is just a bunch of restrictions on how exactly we can do this. A lot of it involves those cases where the thing we're kicking doesn't die from being kicked, which is so rare you never really have to worry about it. The most important thing here is that "in the same direction" bit. This means we're using that "straight line attack" concept explained in the back of the basic rules. The short version is, if we're kicking something directly in front of us, we're not allowed to angle the kick and hit something off to the side. We also specify that the thing we're kicking something into has to be "within our line of sight" after we go and take the thing being kicked off the board. This is a rather technical way of getting across the notion that while it's totally cool to kick something way across the board into another unit, or a building, or any random empty space really, we can't arc our kick up and nail someone off in the distance hiding behind a building. We can kick a building over onto someone standing behind it though (because we're first destroying the building, then checking the line of sight for obstructions). The whole line of sight concept basically just boils down to the fact that hiding behind buildings can often keep you safe. All of the Army's units (with the notable exception of the Death Ray) need to deal with this, but for Gamorzilla, it's only an issue when it gets specifically mentioned on a card.

Now that we've picked apart the two wordiest cards in the game, we shouldn't be getting slowed down like that anymore. The vast majority are phrased far more simply. In any case, we're first moving up a bit, and then Punting one screaming little citizen into another, killing both. That's always fun. Oh, and since this, like most of Gamorzilla's cards, refers to damaging "everything on" these two spaces, we lay down rubble tokens on them (represented as yellow with black dots here). We'll get into what's so great about these really do later on. In this case, they're pretty much just a nice visual representation of how smashed up the board is getting.

Every time the army loses a citizen, they must immediately discard a card, so we're tossing out two here before starting our turn. The idea, basically, is that you start with a huge hand, representing the fact that you have a wide range of options being suggested by various members of the defense force, but as things get increasingly grim, everyone starts getting desperate, so our choices shrink. Just before drawing a card for a new turn, it's often a good idea to take a quick count of your remaining citizens and cards in hand. If you've been playing a card each turn and remembering to discard when citizens go splat, right before drawing a new card, the counts should match up.

Starting off the Army's second turn, we have in hand one of those few cards we actually want to play after moving and attacking. So first we'll do a bit of that, and then we'll play Take Cover. It keeps our Walk type units safe (which at the moment is everything but the tanks) from most of Gamorzilla's attacks, like last turn's Punt, but there's a few cards that can still get around it. Any time a card has a time limit on it like this one does, it's generally a good idea to make a stack of rubble tokens and use them to count it down.

Take note by the way of how we're positioning these tanks. While we can enter the building/railroad spaces no problem, Gamorzilla can't. This sort of positioning cuts off the easiest route to the citizens up by the barracks. Going the long way around still works, but we're hoping to close off more next turn. We could get closer than this too, but then we'd be letting our opponent have a chance to smash us before moving.

Starting up Gamorzilla's next turn and drawing our card, it's important to remember that Take Cover is in effect, and it was played after all these citizens finished moving. So, unless we want to take a break and finally deal with these tanks, we'll need to either find a card that does more than 5 damage to a unit, or some solution that doesn't involve damage to begin with. Ah, here's one: Munch. "Destroy [a unit] with 5 HP or less..." isn't the same thing as "deal 5 damage" so we have us a handy little loophole. So one of these citizens becomes a tasty treat for us, and some of that tank damage that's starting to add up goes away too. This card, for what it's worth, doesn't say anything about "everything on the space" so it doesn't create rubble. Of course, we happen to be using it on a citizen who's standing in a pile of rubble anyway, so that's a moot point as is.

We're down to 7 citizens, and thus have 7 cards before drawing our new one for this turn (and let's not forget to tick down Take Cover), but we're gradually pushing the monster into a corner, and doing some steady damage with our tanks. Let's start this turn off by bringing out the Experimental Robot to lend a hand.

We can place it anywhere in the back row (with the implied exception of the Lab, because this is yet another unit that can't enter building spaces). There's something to be said for putting it by the Barracks, but Gamorzilla probably has some attack that would hit both the robot and the citizen over there, so instead, we'll be placing it next to the scientist, then helping the tanks wall our monster off in this little area here.

Gamorzilla took a nasty pounding that last turn, and it seems our opponent is intent on backing us into a corner. Now, some players might turn around and use the card we're going to play this turn to melt all these attackers done and run off for a while. In some cases, this would be a good call, but they could easily pull a new pile of attackers out of the nearby barracks, and we'd be back in the same position. Besides, if we run around the corner of these buildings, we it's going to be hard to get everyone around to hit us again.

Instead of smashing up tanks, we're going to swing around to this little dead end here and use Atomic Fire Breath as shown below. We're doing a whopping 20 damage to all these spaces, so Take Cover isn't an issue, and we also manage to hit all 4 spaces of the Barracks while we're at it. Now let's discuss what these rubble tokens are really all about.

When a space has a rubble token on it, it's considered a rubble space, instead of building, open, etc. Gamorzilla can freely move through rubble spaces, so first off, we now have an escape plan. Also, remember all that business on the Deploy Armor card about "non-rubble Barracks spaces" way back when? We don't have any of those left now, so if we played that card now, it would only give us a single back row tank. If we only destroyed half of it, they'd still be able to pull out 2 tanks from what was left.

Well, that didn't exactly work out as planned. On the bright side, we've suffered enough loss of citizens and important buildings on this side of the board that we aren't risking much by playing the double-edged sword that is Drop the Bomb. It doesn't do anything at all until the start of our next turn, so Gamorzilla is going to have a chance to move first, and potentially drag some of us along with it. That said, we might as well move our attacking units in for one last good hit, and that one Citizen in the area might as well take a step back, as Take Cover isn't going to do anything against the bomb.

Now, there's something a little unorthodox we're doing to get as much damage as possible done this turn, which may not be evident on the diagram. The tank that's starting its turn in the airport is going to shoot the ground on one of our own building spaces, reducing it to rubble so one of the others can get in position. After firing, this tank is looping around to the left, to help wall off the route to our big citizen wad, and hopefully leave us with at least one living tank after the bomb hits.

Mwahahahaha! Our opponent thinks they have us in a perfect spot to drop the bomb. Take Cover is still in effect for this last turn, so any long range attacks we might have in hand won't get the job done, so it looks like the most damage we can get done is just for us to sit right here, and watch the explosion take out the one citizen and these attackers. Unfortunately for the Army, we've been saving Leaping Lizard in our hand for just this sort of occasion. Now we can go absolutely anywhere on the board.

For what it's worth, this is another card which can has a loophole to get around Take Cover. Since we're presumably getting a bomb dropped on us anyway though, we don't need to take advantage of that. We'll just plop ourselves down right about... here, and leave our opponent with a nasty little dilemma.

Ick. Before the Army even draws their card for this turn, it's time to decide where the bomb is landing. Basically, our options are either to go for the direct 30 damage hit, destroy our entire airport, and lose 3 citizens, or go slightly off center, doing only 20 damage, but keeping 2 of those citizens alive. We could also just cut our losses and dump it in the ocean where it won't do much of anything, but that's just stupid.

One could argue that the sensible option is to go with the 20 damage hit. 20% of their maximum strength and 10% of ours favors us better than 30% and 30%, right? Usually, this logic holds up pretty well, but let's take better stock of the situation here, shall we? So far, we've piled on a total of 43 damage, 10 of which was healed up, so Gamorzilla is either being left at 37 or 47 HP. We're spread pretty far out here, but there's not much left to hide behind. Most importantly, we really don't have much left to throw at the big G here having lost our two main unit sources.

Let's take the risky option! Odds are we aren't going to have our tank pile much longer, and they aren't getting backup soon. Every hit we can land counts. While we're at it, let's see if we can't buy a little more time for some of our citizens by playing the first Weak Point card to come out this game, "Cold! Lizards are cold blooded!" We can count down the effect of this one with a stack of rubble tokens too.

Let's take this chance to explain the premise of Weak Point cards. You'll notice the text box is Gamorzilla's color, and has those nice jagged edges. The idea here is, these are cards which technically belong to your opponent's set, but are mixed into your deck, so you can exploit their unique personal flaws. If we were mixing and matching multiple games in the MvM line, we'd be fishing these out and passing them around accordingly.

Ick. We move all slow, and we have to choose between playing and drawing cards. There's only 3 citizens left to smash though, so let's get closer to one of them. One, two, three steps gets us behind a tank, and then some Atomic Flame Flight gives us an extra boost back to the corner we recently abandoned, while also taking out a tank. Good deal.

Now it's really coming down to the wire. We have just 3 citizens left, one of which is clearly doomed, and our quarry is making a run for it. It's do or die time. Let's get in there as close as we can and then Let'em Have It!

This game still has a couple turns left to play out in it, but we'll be leaving things here for now. There are a number of cards which, if Gamorzilla is lucky enough to have them in hand, will allow a dramatic escape, the destruction of these attackers, or both at the same time. Without them, this is more or less the end. I'll leave it up to your imagination who comes out on top this game.

We've only seen here about a third of the cards found in the game, and for that matter, only half the army's potential units. Hopefully though, this has been enough of a taste to get a feel for the game. If you'd like to buy a copy directly, you can hop on over to our online store and order one. Store owners meanwhile are encouraged to contact us directly for ordering information.