So, you’ve just started playing this miniatures game at the behest of some very persistent creep at your gaming store (or possibly roommate). Everything looks cool, and you pick up the big box labeled starter set. You open it up, and…

Wait. What the hell is this?

It’s a crucible every new Monsterpocalypse player has gone through. It’s one of the few things that we can universally agree on. The starter box sucks. For $25.00 USD, you get one random monster, four preselected units, two buildings, dice, health tracker, and rulebook. This all sounds well and good until it dawns on you that you need ten more buildings before you can field a full city, there’s a 33% chance that you don’t own a single unit that corresponds to your Agenda, the Rulebook is huge and full of jargon, and you’re on your own from there. Toodles!

Lucky for us, Privateer Press recently released what they’re calling the Two Player Battle Box. Whether it’s a push for fresh blood or just an excuse to move some leftover RISE product is really a moot point, because these things are a better starter than the starter sets ever dreamed of being.

As an experiment, I shanghaied my roommate Trevor into splitting the box with me. I had shown him some figures and he likes kaiju movies, but has never played a minis game before, making him a prime test subject for seeing how this new box set ticks. Below are our first forays into the terrible and terrifying world of teaching someone else how to play Monsterpocalypse.

The Contents
Unlike the cube packaging of the starter sets, the Two Player Battle Box is done as to look like a board game; everything you need to play is included, and in theory you’ll never need to buy a booster. The back of the box promises four monster figures (two Alphas and two of their corresponding Hyper Forms), 26 units, and six buildings, plus a set of dice and health tracker for each player. What we found inside, however, was that the box actually contained nine buildings, one of each that can be found in RISE boosters. Our box contained Yasheth plus a horde of Cthul units, which Trevor kept, while I opted for Deimos-9 and a cadre of Martians. Each force of 13 units is RISE only, like the rest of the box’s contents, and consists of three of each grunt, two of each elite, two of one of the utility units, and one of the other. In my case, that meant two Saucers and a Power Pod. For Trevor, that was a Task Master and two Meat Slaves.

I know what you’re thinking. It sounds like a lot of stuff for only the $50.00 that Privateer Press is asking for it. And it is. Going by the average estimates that each building is $5.00 on the singles market (I’m rounding down liberally on this one), $1.00 a grunt, $1.50 for an elite, $7.00 for each utility (again, a liberal estimate), and $10.00 for each monster, that means that in order to replicate the Battle Box in singles, it would cost you at least a $125.00 before adding in the accessories. So even in a vacuum, the box is a phenomenal deal, but does it do what we need it to? That is, how does it perform as a teaching tool?

The Learning

In addition to everything listed above, the box also came with a printed sheet of “Quick Start Rules” designed for new players. As you can imagine, a sixty page rulebook stripped down to one 8.5" x 11" sheet printed front and back is pretty heavily simplified, but I decided to test it out, since we had it anyway.

The general gist of the quick start rules is the complete bare bones of the Monpoc system. It starts both players out with three health on their Alpha forms and no Hypers, and walks you through the steps of the unit and monster turns. It explains brawling, blasting, moving, powering up, and the various other basics, but that’s it. Gone are the abilities, power attacks, and all of the complicated bits. While this allowed Trevor to pick up how the pools worked after only a few minutes, it only took three rounds for both of us to feel that the game was a little stagnant and stale. At that point, I introduced him to cover. The turn after that, I explained to him his monster’s abilities and my own. By the end of the game, we were more or less playing a full game (or as full as could be with no Hyper Forms).

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Publisher Note: Thats a heck of a pic Trevor. Welcome to the Vortex by the way.

I had always wondered how you actually get started in a minis game. It seems like a steep investment upfront in hopes that you enjoy it. $50.00 does sound a lot better than $125.00, but still steep for my pockets (that's what the wife tells me...). -- Chris

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