Game: Monster Island
Publisher: Firefly Games
Series: Action! System
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 11th, August 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00
I don’t know how close it was in the rest of the world but here in Scotland FireFly Games’ Monster Island: The Game of Giant Monster Combat arrived in the local RPG shop the very same week as Mystic Eye’s Giant Monster Rampage. This would seem to be bad for the publishers, especially Firefly who are newer and smaller but it doesn’t seem to have worked out quite like that. The arrival of so many monster products seems to have successfully inspired a kaiju revival (which is good for the publishers) and left us consumers with two rather different and high quality products to try and choose from.
Monster Island has several advantages. On the shelf it’s clearly the glossy production of the two. You just have to pick it up and you’ll notice that it has a card insert of colour monsters in the middle. This insert has been designed so that it can removed from the book, cut up and folded over to produce 16 little cardboard monsters. The advantage of this is clear; you can engage in giant monster combat straight away. It’s the cheaper of the two books as well and this means it’s the slimmer of the two books but that might not always be seen as a disadvantage for this sort of product.
Monster Island uses the Action! System or rather it uses a flavour of it since the book explains how you can translate Giant Monster strength score into strength attribute values used by core Action! System rules. The use of the Action! System and even the logo is a clue to the experience behind the new Firefly games company; both authors, Patrick Sweeney and Bruce Harlick have plenty of professional RPG history (and there’s even a short bio boasting of this in the book). The play testers alone include familiar names such a Robert ‘Doc’ Cross and Nicole Lindroos.
I like the layout of the book. It’s standard two column text but it’s absolutely peppered with boxes of information; about the authors, about the Action! System, Common Sense rules and sample monsters (kaiju) and there’s even more in the way of shaded bubbles (which look like torn slips of paper) with quotes from the famous giant monster movies that created the genre. An average page might have as many as three different quotes on it. When you add in the illustrated content as well it begins to sound as if there’s no room left for any rules! There are rules though and they’re presented in a large font. The layout is so friendly that its easy to imagine younger readers have no problems with it at all.
The game rules are simple enough, perhaps slightly more complex than the layout suggests. Monsters are created easily enough; by spending points from a pool on important stats and by buying giant monster powers and attacks. There are then some derived stats from the main attributes but they’re all easy to work out. There’s a Daze attribute; if your monster takes too much damage in one go he’s dazed. This reflects the way fights go in the movies but this sort of stun is one of the rules that are normally the first to be overlooked in tabletop RPG combat. I don’t know but I suspect the up front presence of the Daze attribute will keep this rule in the forefront. I think Giant Monster Combat will quickly find itself with Big Numbers too. The system uses d6s and it seems easy enough to find yourself rolling 6d6 or even more and then comparing that to a number of different monster attributes (Evade, Daze, etc). This isn’t a bad thing! Lots of gamers prefer the feeling of rolling buckets of dice and although this all builds up into fully-fledged combat system I would imagine it is still suitable for young teenagers. I particularly like the way the ocean and underground are included the game; monsters swim or tunnel and can spring up from below and surprise rivals. The game’s combat system goes as far as including ambush bonuses. I don’t see why teleporting beside a rival monster doesn’t count as an ambush but I suppose this is a classic case of the common sense rule (found on page 22) where we’re encouraged to work out rules like that among the players.
There is more than just rules for giant moshes in Monster Island though. There’s actually quite a study on the monster movies in the multi-paged filmography that covers the Toho (famous for Godzilla), the Gamera films as well as suitable American movies that are done in the same style (The Blob, Tarantula, etc).
I’ve not said anything about the UN Science Alert Corps either and these are important people. Firefly even has the trademark. The Corps are responsible for putting the monsters all together on Monster Island and keeping them there. They’re the people who managed to salvage the energy shield from the remains of an alien spaceship. They’re also the people who do what they can to stop the local undersea Lemurians from bringing down the force shield and letting the monsters destroy the surface world. Aliens? Lemurians? Ah yes, there’s a bit of a backdrop to the whole Monster Island setting. I quite like this, it makes it easier to spin some sort of story together behind a series of giant monster fights and turn it into something of a campaign. This backdrop also provides the springboard for future expansions to the game and at the back of the book you’ll find the advert for “Escape from Monster Island” which promises to provide the rules for wrecking cities and smashing tanks. Escape from Monster Island also is said to include another card stock of giant monsters. I think the chance to build up a small collection of giant monster minis (albeit paper ones) is quite a lure.
I think Monster Island: The Game of Giant Monster Combat is great fun. It’s easy to pick up and easy to play. It’s the sort of thing you could entertain friends with at very short notice providing you don’t squash too many of the cardboard monster figures!
