Session Impressions: Kaiju City
The Myriad Games Podcast posted our review of Kaiju City’s playtest copy back in early July. At the time, Kaiju City had a few more weeks before it needed to achieve its Kickstarter goal of $10,000 to become a real game. Kaiju City fell short, receiving a pledge of $4,160. How unfortunate.
At one point, if you listen to this podcast, Dan asked me if I liked the game. I stutter, and say “Well… it’s a game.” That sounds like I secretly didn’t like it, but that isn’t true. Up until I was asked that question, I hadn’t asked myself “Did I enjoy myself while playing this game?”. I didn’t do that, because I was having fun playing the game. So I tripped over myself, and stumbled over words for time. It was a good game. I’m still a little miffed on how the board naturally expanded by placing city tiles diagonally away from the corners of the board, taking up as much space as possible on your kitchen table. But, outside that, I liked the game.
The good news is that on Kaiju City’s Kickstarter Page, Kaiju City’s team told us that “The plot of many Kaiju movies is something like… Monster rises from obscurity… Monster finds a city to love… City rejects Monster… Monster throws a temper tantrum… Monster skulks away sadly… BUT MONSTER ALWAYS COMES BACK.” It’s good to see that this setback won’t deter Kaiju City’s team. It’s clear they spent a lot of time and energy making a good game. They could have released the playtest copy, and it would have looked great.
I’m confident we’ll see this monster lift out of the waters of Tokyo Bay once more to terrorize the city. While The Western World may not have a long running fascination with giant monsters ripping up cities the way that Japan does, we do have a long running fascination with Japan. Every ten years or so, the “Giant Monster and the City” theme rears it’s head as a global phenomenon. Fear of Giant Monsters (Gigatetraphobia?) is often coupled with fear of ‘The Bomb’. The idea, even when presented as something absurd, is terrifying. It’s understandable why movies about avatars of destruction can’t maintain a permanent place in Hollywood’s film cycle; gigatetraphobia is exhausting. Had Kaiju City appeared when monster movies like ‘The Blob’ and ‘Tarantula’ sold out box offices, or when Godzilla was ‘discovered’ by American audiences in the mid-70s, or during the 1998 Hollywood remake of Godzilla, or the 2005 release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, then hitting its goal would have been a foregone conclusion. Given another five years, another giant monster movie will spray its atomic breath over us, and we’ll break out with a case of the Kaiju City fever.
In the meantime, you can still enjoy our podcast on Kaiju City. I’m more than happy to support this game, even if it takes a number of years to flap its leathery wings and take to the air. When it does, it will a dreadful day, indeed.
