Quick Review: Mars Attacks! by Mantic Games

Over the weekend I decided it was time to break out the Mars Attacks game that I'd ordered months ago and give it a push around.  I'd liked the reviews that I read before I purchased the game so it only seemed right that I should finally get it to the table even as a solo play.

The overall mechanics are really straightforward.  The stats and rolls are pretty intuitive with some special rules that add some flavor to how each of the minis plays.  In fact that was something that I realized I was doing wrong as I forgot that the Martian troops all have the armor special rule.  Kind of explains why they were dying so fast...

The Martian invasion begins!

The game also has a card mechanic is also a really interesting twist that I haven't seen used effectively in a minis game before. During a round, each player can activate two minis or one mini and play a card.  The cards have various different effects from calling in air support to increasing a model's accuracy for a shot, not to mention a number of crazy special effects that introduce battlefield effects.  During my play through there were civilians running around the battle field, two herds of flaming cattle stampeding, and a mutant bug showed up as well!  All of this adds to the chaos of the game but in a good way as it keeps you on your toes.

Watch out for the flaming cows!!!

Is it an incredibly deep tactical game?  No, but it does feel like a nice and quick beer and pretzels game.  It also doesn't seem like a game that will take hours to get through.  The base game is played on a 2' x 2' board with a grid already laid out so not only are you right in each others faces right from the start, plus there is no measuring so you just count your squares and shoot.

And I thought the mosquitos were bad this year!

All of this said it does make me wonder if its out of print.  It doesn't seem like Mantic did a lot to support this game once it was released and they had even announced that it would no longer be available a couple of months ago.  Right now the base game is not available on their site but most of the expansions are, including Mars Attacks: World War which is all of the core rules plus some extra stuff as well so it looks like most of the product line is still available, just not the boxed game.  Unfortunately this means that you can still get into the game but at a much higher price tag since the base game offered a substantial savings. Personally I wouldn't buy into it piecemeal like that due to the price you'll wind up paying but if you can find the base game for cheap it might be worth checking out.