Number of players: 3 – 6
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes (Maybe. I haven’t timed it yet.)
What you need:
- Instructions (see below – you don’t have to print these, but load them up on your phone or something so they’re easy to check)
- Printed components (see below – paper and card required)
- At least one dice
- Something to act as a first-player marker (spare board tile, misplaced meeple, someone’s shoe, etc)
Premise
What do you do when a giant monster won’t stop attacking the town? That’s right, take out insurance so you can get a nice chunk of cash when the monster destroys things you own.
And of course, you’ve a trick up your sleeve: you can control the monster! But maybe you’re not the only person in town who’s come up with this plan …
Players take it in turns to secretly play a card that allows them to a) place tokens to insure people, cars, and buildings, b) program part of the monster’s movement for that turn, and c) bid to go first next turn.
The monster’s movement and attacks are then resolved based on all cards played that turn. Players need to watch each other closely to try and predict what they can do with their own play.
Files
Printing/construction tips
There’s nothing fancy you have to do. Just print out all the documents and stick them to some card, then cut them out. (You don’t have to cut out the blank tokens – they’re not there for any reason other than 22 not being a square number).
You’ll have to print out the “cards” document six times. Everything else, if you print out the whole document – that’s everything you need.
If you don’t have a colour printer, go with the black and white board tiles. The design is uglier, but it’ll make it a hell of a lot easier to understand what’s going on with the board (particularly whether a building has been claimed).
You don’t have to print out all the tiles if you don’t want to. There are 48 tiles in each document. At most, you’ll need 24 for a game.
When the tokens are face up on the board, it shouldn’t be obvious which player they belong to, so it would probably be best to have them on plain card with just a spot of colour on the back.
For ease of end-game scoring, write “-1” on the back of any house tokens. You can also write “1” on the back of the other tokens as well if you want to be thorough.
With the cards, I’d recommend getting some cards you don’t need for anything else (like some old playing cards) and slipping them into card sleeves.
Then you can just slip in the paper with the card designs and that’s saved you a whole lot of time cutting and gluing. Not to mention that if the cards ever need to be changed, you don’t have to do it all again!
You could use a plastic dinosaur instead of the printed monster standee, but in tests we found this awkward. It got in the way of placing anything else on the board and tended to fall over – knocking tokens around, etc.
Credits
Building images for the colour tiles are taken from Roguelike Modern City Pack from opengameart.org.
Road images for the board tiles came from Road and water tiles (from isometric set) from opengameart.org.
Token icons, card icons, and parts of the monster design came from game-icons.net.
The font on the cards is Wonder Comic.