Meeple City will never be the same by the time players are done with Terror in Meeple City (formerly known as Rampage). Two-to-four players will take turns smashing buildings and eating people until the city is nothing but rubble. The civilians may be on borrowed time, but they will fight back if enough of them escape. When they do, they’ll knock out your teeth or find other ways to slow you down.
I love the concept of Terror in Meeple City. The thought of it kind of makes me think of reverse Jenga, where the point of it is to generate mass destruction. While it certainly is a game that lets you break stuff, the actual fun that comes from toppling buildings isn’t as fulfilling as I thought it would be.
The game takes place on a board that’s designed to look like a city from an overhead perspective. There are a number of predetermined locations that will act as the base of your buildings, which are created with meeples and floor tiles. A few cars are also strewn about the city, though we’ll get to those in just a second.
Each player’s monster starts out on a corner of the board. Monsters consist of two wooden pieces: a fully-figured monster and a circular disc meant to represent their feet. Before the start of the game, each player gets a Character, Power and Super Secret Power card that will give you special abilities. Though the game is mostly about breaking stuff, the cards do add a touch of strategy to the action.
Players have four different actions at their disposal, of which they can use two during their turn. You can flick the disc to move your monster closer to a building. If your monster’s feet are touching a sidewalk, you can drop the monster on top of the building. You can throw a nearby car at a building by flicking it from the top of your monster’s head. Or, if you’ve got the lungs for it, you can place your chin on the top of your monster’s head and blow as hard as you can.
As you pummel these buildings, meeples will go flying everywhere. Any meeples that land in your neighbourhood are eatable, so long as you have enough teeth to eat them. Also, any floor tiles topple over, you claim those too. If any displaced meeples land outside of your neighbourhood but are still on the board, you’ll have to move over there before you can make them your next meal. However, if they fly off of the board, they successfully escape the city and are tracked on a special sheet. If you hit a certain threshold of escaped meeples on your turn, you’ll suffer the consequences of their retaliation, which can include the loss of teeth, an extra action for your opponents, or some other penalty that’s going to suck.
Conceptually, Terror in Meeple City seems like a sure-fire winner of a game. Who wouldn’t want to topple over cities like Godzilla or King Kong? While it does deliver some base-level thrills, it doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying as I would have hoped. In reality, dropping your monster on a building isn’t all that fun, throwing the car is really hard to do and probably not all that effective, and even the hardest of heaves will likely only slide a handful of meeples off of a ledge. At a certain point, the game also feels kind of mindless and random, as you can’t really control where the meeples will go once you bash a building in.
I think that kids and casual gamers will get a kick out of Terror in Meeple City. However, the core experience of breaking things wears out its welcome pretty quickly, while not being all that fulfilling in the first place. I don’t really know what they could add or fix to make this experience more appealing to me, so maybe this just isn’t for me.
In Third Person 