Rampage (Terror in Meeple City) First Impressions

In Rampage, you Flick, Blow Drop…

No George, Lizzy or Ralph?

In Rampage, you arrive in Meeple City as a gigantic, famished, scaly-skinned monster! Your goal: Dig your claws and dirty paws into the asphalt, destroy buildings, and devour innocent meeples – in short: sow terror while having fun. The monster who has caused the most damage after the carnage finally ends wins the game.

The goal of this game is to destroy a building, eat sets of Meeples and knock out other players’ teeth… in a fun way of course.

Setup

The buildings are made up of floors with layers of Meeples holding them up. This makes them impressively 3D but also fairly vulnerable to falling…

Your Monster itself is quite a large wooden figure on a disk which represents its paws. Each player starts in their own corner of the board and once Meeple City is set up, the game can begin.

Each player has 3 cards. One is an end-game scoring card, one is an ability card and the other is a face-down “Super Secret” power. I’ll quickly explain how to play then I’ll show you which cards I had. (So they make sense)

Actions

So you have 2 actions on a turn with 4 things to do in Rampage.

Move – You take your monster off its base and ‘flick’ the feet. You stay where you land and put the Monster back on the disk.

Demolish – If your Paw disk is touching the sidewalk around a building you can try to demolish it! To do this, from a seated position and a level arm, pick up your Monster and drop it on the building! Boom!

Throw a Vehicle – Each area of Meeple City is divided up into clearly defined sections (by colour and background) If you are in a section with one of the 4 Wooden Vehicles you can throw it at something. Pick up the Vehicle, put it on top of your Monster, and Flick!

Breathe – Rest your chin on the Monster’s head and blow! (Make sure you free your mouth of excess moisture ;))

Once you have taken your two actions you then get to eat any Meeples in your area. You can eat as many Meeple as you have Teeth. Your monster has 2 permanent teeth and 4 which can be knocked out.

You also get to keep any floors of buildings you knock off.

Of course, Monsters hate to waste food so there are penalties for knocking Meeples off the board. This is a great way to stop people just being OVERLY aggressive and keeps it a game of skill rather than a game of power.

Having said that, you can knock out your competitor’s teeth if you knock them over. Fun!

Meeples

The Meeples are in different colours – blue (journalists), green (military), yellow (blondes), grey (old people), red (heroes), and black (businessmen). This is important for scoring…

At the end of the game, you get…

10 Points – Each full set of 6 different Meeples you eat
1 Point – Each floor tile
2 Points – Each tooth you knock out of an opponent’s face

My Romantic bonus card gave me 3 bonus points for each Blonde and Hero (Yellow and Red) couple I ate. Also, my Hurricane ability allowed me to use the Breathe ability from the top of ANY Monster.

My once-per-game Secret Ability “Teeth Protector” allows me to stop one of my Teeth being knocked out and instead knocks out one of my opponents. Ha!

Rampage Summary

The game is pretty fun… 80% of the time. You can miss flick or have a building not move etc and that’s fine, that’s part of the skill game.

The trouble is, as things are destroyed and eaten there isn’t much left to do for the last part of the game except hit the end game condition. This means trying to get the last floor from the last building and it can take a while.

I’m glad I got to play it, it’s fun and the cards add great replayability but it’s 20 minutes too long.

Jesta ThaRogue