Mars Attacks Miniatures Game - A Preview

While at the Warlord Games Open Day yesterday I had the good fortune to have a demo of the new Mars Attacks Miniatures Game recently funded via one of Mantic Games's Kickstarters as well as getting a good look at the game pieces themselves as well as the rulebook.

Apologies for the somewhat blurry nature of some of the pictures and that I didn't photograph everything but as I'm sure you understand it was a popular location and they weren't going to stop doing demonstrations just because I wanted pics of everything...but I'm sure you'll get the general idea. The box set comes with all the bits and pieces needed to play a game including some rather interesting templates...

I mean where would we be without a 'flaming cattle' template...

The 'hero' models are very nice. I've included a close-up of one of my favourites as well as some painted Martians courtesy of Titan Games...

The games basic mechanics are broadly similar to those of Deadzone including the dice mechanic and how the majority of the stats work though the overall rule-set is simpler and the games run a bit faster (at least our few did).

Each player has a hand of cards which trigger events and can be played on yours and the enemy models as appropriate and these cards are replenished after each turn...

...and the cards have a variety of interesting effects though they tend to have a more amusing description than the Deadzone ones despite the basic concepts being in many instances similar (such as increasing a stat or adding dice) though there are some more interesting ones in there as well. For example, one of the cards I played against the Martians makes two of them (as long as they are in the same square) count as already activated by virtue of the fact that it makes them argue about which of them has killed the most humans, lol. There are also event cards that cause things to happen such as stampeding flaming cattle or inconveniently placed humans...there are templates for these events though those of you who backed the Kickstarter will probably have actual models for some of them on the way...

Another interesting idea is that certain of the cards can be stacked so a single version might cause an artillery strike on a random location anywhere on the board, two would be targeted on a single row with three actually hitting a square you specify. I frustratingly managed to miss five Martians in the same row with one of the 'not quite random' ones.....

Lets have a look at the rulebook now...It's pretty much all here...I think they only let me get away with taking pictures of it all because they knew my camera was too crappy for you to be able to make out all the rules from the pics, lol.

Here it is anyway.....

So there you go...

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.