Wallace? Waro? Ameritrash?...Moongha Invaders: Mad Scientists and Atomic Monsters Attack the Earth!

When you think of Wallace you think a couple of things. Lots of dice, well balanced, and a nice dry Chianti. But Moongha Invaders: Mad Scientists and Atomic Monsters Attack the Earth!  adds a little spice to that mix. It definitely is not your typical Wallace fare. In Moongha, you play a mad scientist out to destroy the planet with you gang of giant mutated monster mash. Bwahahahahaha!
  First I'll take about the game itself. The map is a risk like layout with all the major cities of the world, with connections to each other. Each player has a set of identical monsters to start with and two cities picked at random. These cities must have paid that One Million Dollars, because those are the ones you want to save(Possibly for future experiments) . Each of the seven monsters(Kidoo, Spectoor, Shaggoo, Bloob, Moogre, and Mechoor) has a special ability attached to it, and only the last three mentioned can attack cities outright. The game is played for 8-9 rounds depending on the number of players. Each round there are six different actions to select from. However each action starts off with a set number of selections, and an x numbers of random actions added depending on what turn it is. The first action allows you to either build a part of a monster or heal one damage on an existing monster. Once the monster cost is complete, it is let loose hidden on earth. The second action is and attack token. This allows the monsters to attack other monsters in the city or attack the city itself, if the city is attacked, then each military unit must be destroyed before the city takes damage. Each token is multiplied by it's attack value to give you the number of dice you get to roll. The next action is move or hide. This lets a monster move from one city to an adjacent city, or hide. Hiding is good, as it prevents the army and other monsters from attacking you. The next action is the HERO, he is used to find and unhide monsters in a city. He also activates any human army units in the city to attack any uncovered monsters. The next action is Military 1. This action allows you to take a unit from the action box and place it into a city, if there are any unhidden monster there, they can now be attacked, PLUS, it activates all other existing military units. The last action is Military 2. This action is the same as the first one, but has more powerful units.
  Scoring is at end game and includes, points for destroying a city the most and second most. Protecting you cities from annihilation,  Any monsters your Moogre eats, and the number of Drakoors you have on the board. And that is a fairly digested overview of the game.

Now for the interesting part, how does it play? The game plays pretty smooth, but it may be a bit on the long side. Eight full turns, and a lot of fiddly upkeep started to show that maybe this could have been cut down by a couple of turns to really shine. We did notice a couple of cool strategies to take.

1. Bloobs. Bloobs are cool as you have three you can build, and they can attack buildings. But also the fact that you can build each one after the first at 2 cost instead of three. They are also cool in the fact that as you collect attack tokens, and if you have them all on the board in different cites, no one can pinpoint where you will attack with bloob. The weakness of the bloob strategy is once moogre's come out, they tend to turn into puppy chow. But if you play there city attacks early, this will give you a nice quick bump of city tokens.

2.Moogre Lunch. This seemed to be a nice strategy. Moogre's can eat other monster which take them out of the game and give you VP's at the end of the game. A couple of players took this route and munched a big selection of baddies throughout the game. The problem with this strategy, is you can see them coming, and players will either run or hide away.

3. Nuke'em from space, it's the only way to be sure. If a city exceeds 7 attacks tokens by the end of the game, it is essentially out of the game, and scores nothing for anybody, even the owners of the tokens. So a good way to insure that no one get points for those, is well, destroy them. either my nuke or overwhelming attacks.

4.Measly Humans. Well they look puny, but they kick ass! I noticed the other players were trying to ramp up their monster attack tokens...but me, I just kept sending in the army. Why, well because each time you put an army token in, it attacks and activates each other army token. After a while, a city becomes a killing machine. DON'T IGNORE THE HUMANS!

You definitely need to run a balanced game for an overall win. Attacking cities it cool, but you don't want to attack them "too" much, as it renders them useless if they exceed 8. It may be a good idea to attack a city, get your majority tokens, and then protect it a while.

Overall I thought is was a pretty cool game. I love to see how Martin Wallace struck out and did something a little different that what he is known for.  I can't decide what category to put this in, is it a Waro or is it Ameritrash. It plays like a Waro but heavy in theme. I think both camps would probably embrace Moongha. And I love the art, and the comic book like illustrations. Top notch for a typical Wallace. And the rules are not hard to grasp once you know how everything flows together. A couple of complaints that include rules, is sometime Wallace tends to not explain some of the "corner" cases, for instance if a city has one of my monsters(hidden), another players monster(hidden), and an army unit, if I bring in a scout and uncover only my monster, am I forced to attack him, since I get to select. And a few other weird case we encountered. As always designers, EXAMPLES, EXAMPLE, and more EXAMPLES please.