Bored? Game! – Rampage

Any gamer over a certain age will likely remember the videogame Rampage, whether it be its original manifestation as an arcade cabinet or one of its many console ports, like Rampage World Tour on the PS1. The game drew on Japanese Kaiju monster movies to place the players in the roles of rampaging beasts set to the task of demolishing whole city blocks by punching them repeatedly in the face.

Most of these actions will either see you comically fail or send showers of card board and wooden pieces onto the floor

A new board game of the same name by Repos Production seeks to recapture the zany, chaotic charm of those original games, and it does so flawlessly. However, instead of trying to shoehorn the theme into a trending modern board gaming genre, such as deck building (I’m looking at you Marvel), veteran French designer Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders, Ghost Stories), joined by Ludovic Maublanc (designer of the excellent party game Cash $ Guns), has found a near one-to-one match with the feel of the original game’s mechanics in the form of a dexterity game.

Now dexterity games, which see players flicking and throwing things around and generally having fun, have traditionally come under flack from hardcore hobby gamers who look at them with the same kind of scorn that we should all reserve for childhood mass market games like Monopoly. But whilst there has always been a subset of gamers that have relished playing noisy games of Pitch Car racing at conventions to distract the frowning gamers playing complicated railway simulations, there’s been a growing recent trend, no doubt sparked by the rapidly broadening appeal of board games, of taking dexterity elements and applying them to modern game design in interesting ways. Catacombs, for instance, is a dungeon crawl RPG, where all the heroes, monsters and spells are discs of varying weights that can be flicked around the board. Rampage falls firmly into this tradition.

In Rampage four players take control of brightly coloured Godzilla clones consisting of a heavy wooden body standing on a disc, representing your feet. Meanwhile the city consists of several three storey buildings constructed each time from chunky card board floors held up by wooden meeples, which represent the unsuspecting humans busy at work in the office, relaxing at the cinema, or engaging in triad activities (one floor’s artwork shows a conference table piled high with cash and guns in call back to Maublanc’s earlier game). It’s an ingenious set up that’s only made possible by some top quality component construction.

Gameplay is delightfully simple. On your turn you can take two of four potential actions. You can lift up your body and flick the disc (moving); if you’re touching a sidewalk you can lift your wooden body above the table and drop it on a building (stomping); you can put your chin on top of your creature and blow (radioactive breath); or you can place a wooden car on your creature’s head and flick it into a building. Most of these actions will either see you comically fail or send showers of card board and wooden pieces onto the floor. Either result is pretty hilarious, although playing it as I did in a cramped, dimly lit pub is probably inadvisable.

The game does punish you for being too gung ho. Meeples that leave the board are said to have ‘fled the city’ and if too many do this you suffer a penalty or it triggers the end of the game. This factor cleverly forces you to find a sweet spot with your flick. Too hard and all hell will break loose; not hard enough and you will have wasted an action. At the end of your turn you eat as many meeples in your current area as you have teeth in your mouth (teeth can be stolen via combat with other creatures) and at the end of the game you score complete sets of 6 coloured meeples collected behind your hidden player screen (your stomach).

To spice things up a bit each monster has a different scoring condition (one may be the brawler, gaining extra points for stealing teeth from other players, or the Romantic, gaining points for eating the red hero meeples and the yellow blondes) and each creature has a visible reusable special power and a secret one shot power. These powers, though wildly imbalanced, mix up an already frantic and deeply silly game. Imagine my surprise when my opponent revealed their secret power, which allowed them to put my monster on their head and flick it like a car, breaking a tooth (as well as their finger) in the process.

Every time I’ve played Rampage it’s been a cavalcade of destructive hilarity, often forcing the game to break down into fits of laughter. It’s colourful, zany stupid fun, just like the original game, and that’s the best accolade it could hope for. If you think you’re the kind of person who needs a silly dexterity game in your collection (and who wouldn’t?) then they don’t come any better than this.

Designer: Antoine Bauza & Ludovic Maublanc
Publisher: Repos Production
Mechanic: Dexterity
Players: 2-4 (best with 4)
Game length: 60 minutes
Complexity: Very light