At the weekend I was browsing stalls and geekstores while on a weekend holiday, and spotted a little box called "Godzilla Stomp". Had me curious and for £10 I thought why not? Worse ways I could blow the pocket change right? Having seen nothing about it on the search function here, I thought I would do a bit of a review.
Godzilla Stomp is a bidding/luck pushing style card game from Toy Vault Inc about Kaiju monsters battling it out to do what they do best, destroy helpless buildings. BBG has it under the "Trick Taking" and "Simultaneous actions" mechanics. It's wonderfully simple to play (Since the weekend i'v played it with typically none gamers, one of which was an 11 year old sibling to put the simple part into context).
The first thing you notice, is of course the box. Its small, small enough to fit into the pocket of your cargo pants say or the glove box of your car. A little shorter than the bronzebox games from
FFG i think they're called. But the box art is certainly eye catching, the unmistakable classic kaiju era godzilla paw coming down on some poor mook. Colourful and eye catching, it also looks like it's slightly bursting at the seems. It's not unfortunately, but what it is is that the box seems to be made from some seriously thick heavy duty card. Definitely one I don't see my having to replace down the road. The back repeats a similar image, only with text about the game, some pictures of the cards and a recomendation to go try the companies boardgame version of it, "Godzilla Kaiju world war".
Opening and emptying the box, the first thing I unfortunately notice is this:
The cards being standard playing card size, this thing takes up nearly half the box space. So that's a bit of an annoyance. The other "Space Saver" they seem to have decided on is the rules page itself. And page is being generous (mods if the pic needs removing or altering do let me know, thanks)
I get the game is simple, but A5 simple seems a bit excessive.
Other than that though the cards are rather nicely made, which makes up for it. The cardstock used is about average, but the art is bold, colourful and generally nice on the eyes. The cards are varied into two types, Kaiju cards:
And heres the back
And Building cards
.
All in all there are 30 Kaiju cards numbered 1-5 themed around each of the five Kaiju, and a rampage card with an Alt image of the beast shooting some variety of laser or another. The Kaiju in question are Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, Mothra, Destroyah and Batdra. So a nice splash of classic era monsters. The building cards are almost all the same stock image of some destroyed buildings numbered either 3,5,7 or 9 with another general building image as the reverse side. So no mistaking what they are then. The Nuclear Plant cards are nice though, with the little sign being a nice touch. 42 building cards plus the 30 kaiju cards and one box that I feel was a bit of a space waste. Oh well.
As for the game itself, like I said its simple. A5 11 year old levels of simple. Good fun though. Basically it lasts for 6 rounds, each person picks a kaiju and each round a number of building cards are revealed. Everyone plays a card from their hand face down and reveals all in one go, "bidding" their card. The one who played the highest card gets first pick of the buildings (or rather gets to destroy the most buildings)and any none destroyed buildings are discarded. And so on and so forth, the game ending when everyone has played their 6 cards (they're discarded after having been bid of course). Fun and simple, but some easy going "tactical" (if you can call it that) depth in figuring out when it's worth using your high cards or taking the hit and using a low one. After Six rounds the person with the highest number of total buildings destroyed wins.
Two elements in the game serve to spice it up though. The first is the powerplants, these have 4 different values, 2/4/6/8. Sound strange? Well it's not. Of the 6 Powerplant cards in the deck, their value changes depending on how many you have destroyed. So while a single powerplant may not seem worth taking over a 9 building card, if you can get a total of 4 suddenly they're worth 8 points each.
The other element to spice it up is the nice and characterful Rampage card. These are simple and thematic, basically you will always pick last, but rather than discarding the remaining cards, you get to take all of them. A real ace up the sleeve if played right (for instance when the only cards left all happen to be high cards).
For an idea of what a "normal" game looks like, here's a two player game
Dice bag in the corner not included of course. But that's it, the building deck, unused kaiju cards, space for two discard piles, that turns building cards and space to put the bid cards face down for a minute or two while people decide. this is close to a 2'x2' table, if that.
Overall, worth the £10 price tag. A nice one to play on a car journey or when you have 20 minutes to kill after a long session of something serious, or even as I did as something to play with smaller people or none gamers. Simple, fun and doesn't take much space. Yes, it could probably do with a bit more tactical depth (though I may just be being needlessly picky now
) but game wise I got what I paid for. Content wise the loose piece of card annoyed me, the rules say any ties are settled by "The Tie Smasher" who is basically someone with a coin that gets passed to the next person along every turn. I just feel the extra space could have been used for a themed card token to use or even a dice.
Tl:dr In the end though, I would give this game a 4/5 for gameplay (it's simple and idiot proof but a fun way to kill five minutes) and 3/5 for content (pretty card art, average card quality, but the box annoys me) for a total of a 7/10. Wouldn't go out of your way to pick it up, but if you see it go ahead and give it a go.
- 1250 points
