Monopolis 2018 report

Yes, I ran my Monopolis game at MillenniumCon back in November. It went well. I had my standard setup with eight or nine players--five attackers and four defenders--fighting over the poor beleaguered city of Monopolis. I gave each player an objective card detailing a specific goal for that person's units, like capturing a certain location by making sure no enemy units are within firing range at the end of the game.

As usual, it took a long time to set up the board. Note that the city sections are all perched atop other terrain pieces. The reason for this will become apparent later on.

The green units (defenders) could set up anywhere on the board, but they (wisely) mainly stayed within the city limits for that defensive bonus. Each side got cruise missiles, which has kind of become a tradition for these games. Below you can see the defenders' cruise missile crawlers, guarded by infantry in the warehouse and docks district.

While that's a lot of megatonnage, I do make each side wait a turn or two for clearance before they can launch their nukes. This gives the players time to maneuver and get into combat, as the two largest Ogres did.

The attacking Mark V (gray) closed on the defending Mark V (green). This ended up being bad news for the emergency response vehicles (red) nearby. I give the defender's fire trucks in this scenario a chance to "repair" a damaged town hex by removing the damage marker to simulate their firefighting ability.

This battle was exciting, as the attacker charged the defending cybertank! We had an overrun with shooting and ramming and more shooting till eventually one of the Ogres was stripped of all its weapons.

This bloodthirsty battle caused a great deal of collateral damage to the city while other firefights took place elsewhere on the map.

Eventually, both sides had clearance to launch cruise missiles. The first few were shot down without damaging anything. The attackers' final nuke, however, detonated over the city one space away from where the Ogres were slugging it out.

While the two Mark Vs were not harmed by the blast (Ogres are extremely tough!), it pretty much wiped out Monopolis. All town and forest hexes up to four spaces away were automatically turned into rubble, and those five or six hexes out were damaged. This is where putting all those rubble markers beneath the town and forest terrain paid off in time saved, since I could just pick the destroyed terrain up and the rubble was already there.

With allotted time running out, I called the game. The attackers had the edge in numbers, but since they ended up nuking most of their objectives (as well as the defenders'), I called it a draw. The players seemed to like the game, and as usual I had fun running it. Now to think about a scenario for next year ....