Mega City One Spring Clean Challenge

I’ve given my general thoughts about the game on my game review blog, but to summarize: I like the models and components a lot, but I don’t think I care for the rule set. Every attack requires two opposed rolls, meaning that to make an effective attack I have to succeed at an attack roll, my opponent has to fail an evade roll, then I have to succeed at a damage roll, and my opponent has to fail at their resist roll. It’s an awful lot of rolling, and a lot of chances to fail.

Additionally, the scenarios seem a little under-written and poorly thought out. In both of our games, one side had either a much easier win condition or a poorly defined one like “prevent the other player from succeeding.”

The Big Meg and Armory cards are meant to provide flavor and variety, and sometimes they succeeded, adding little, unpredictable details to prevent the game from getting stale. However they just as often led to an unfair advantage for one side of the other – one card in particular, “Confusion Reigns!” was devastating, taking away two of my action chips which essentially stopped me from being able to play for the rest of the turn.

I love the models and the setting, and I definitely want to keep gaming in Mega City One, but I don’t think I want to do it using this rule set. One possibility might be to house rule in order to simplify the game and come up with some more interesting scenarios. Another option would be to switch to a different set of rules. 7TV is an obvious choice, or really any game with a vaguely futuristic urban setting. One thing we thought was missing from the game was the sense that the environment was a populated city – it seemed like we were fighting on deserted streets. With that in mind, something that handles non-player civilians well would be good. Possibly a re-skin of Core Space, with block gangs or other villains replacing the killer robots. I would love to hear other suggestions from the community.

If nothing else, I think the old GW Block Mania board game (recently reprinted by Rebellion Studios) is designed so that the cardboard counters can be replaced with miniatures…