Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Terror in Meeple City

Game: Terror in Meeple City

Publisher: Repos Productions

Designer: Antoine Bauza & Ludovic Maublanc

Year: 2013

  


Do you like destroying things? Have you always wanted to be Godzilla for a day? You don’t mind looking like a fool whilst doing it? And you enjoy searching for meeples under your sofa? Terror in Meeple City might be the game for you!

Terror in Meeple City is a light-hearted dexterity game for 2-4 players. The board is a 3-dimensional city-scape with a number of multi-storey buildings which are held up by meeples. There are also chunky bus tokens and of course the city is populated by fearsome monsters. Each player is responsible for a monster who wants to destroy buildings and each meeples.

On your turn you have two actions. You can choose to; flick the disk representing you monster’s feet in order to move your monster; if your monster’s feet are on the pavement of a building you can drop the monster from a height to try and break the building apart; you can pick up a vehicle, put it on your monsters head and flick it across the board towards buildings or your opponent’s monster; or you can rest your chin on the monster and try to bow buildings over or blow meeples around the board. With all of these actions you need to be careful not to be too enthusiastic as there can be penalties when you knock meeples off the board.

Once you’ve taken your actions you can reap your rewards. Any floors on buildings which no longer have meeples on them are now your property and the number of teeth you have left determines how many meeple you can eat from the segment of the board you are standing in. The meeples are different colours, so you might want to eat specific colours to benefit your end of game scoring.

DESTRUCTION!!!

There’s not a huge amount of skill in the game, although for me, flicking accurately is just not something I can do so the game can feel pretty difficult. There’s very little tactics that go into it – a few decisions need to be made like heading towards zones with the meeple colours you need to get end game points or not doing a very risky action when the consequence might be to lose your teeth. However, so long as that’s not what you’re looking for then Terror in Meeple City is undeniably fun, getting everyone at the table really involved and up out of their seats – the winner can sometimes seem a bit random, but it really doesn’t matter when you’ve had such a good time.

There are one or two negative things to say. The artwork is amazing and it’s well worth putting in the (very significant) time to sticker all the meeples and pieces to make the game move visually appealing, however the board quality annoys me. I’ve played two different copies of the game and both have had a problem that the sticky-back plastic does not hold the building bases in place. One vigourous flick in the game can sometimes move the base of the building. My only other negative thing to say is that although the game works absolutely fine with 2 players, it definitely thrives with more. With two players it can be a struggle to wiggle your way between the buildings to get to all 4 corners of the board, and there’s just less monsters to throw buses at, which is a fun moment of the game.

The chunky wooden components which require some commitment to accurate stickering!

That said, Terror in Meeple City is one of my favourite dexterity games. It has a brilliant theme and a great visual appeal and is basically a guaranteed fun time for a group of friends, so long as they don’t think they’re heading into a tactical game. The Yellow Meeple gives Terror in Meeple City a 7/10.