The Monster Comes for Us (TMCfU) is certainly an interesting idea—what if the Quiet Year (TQY) were a character-driven game about combat? Ultimately, however, the game doesn’t go far enough in realizing its tremendous potential. Most of the gameplay is ultimately similar to TQY, and involves drawing cards from a standard 52-card deck and documenting the evolving story on paper. TMCfU innovates on this format by adding a conflict, which is something TMCfU lacks, or at least leaves to the players to discover through emergent gameplay. It does this by coming with the baked-in premise of a group of monster hunters fighting a monster, and by having the players play as individual characters rather than as a nebulous societal gestalt. Rather than having the deck divided by suit into seasons, in TMCfU the cards remain unsorted and instead each suit serves to flesh out a different part of the world (players, monster, resources, worldbuilding). While the player backstory and worldbuilding cards are just for flavor, the monster and resource cards are both counted over the course of play. When eight monster cards have been drawn, the monster attacks, and the players have to make a 2d6 dice check to counter each of the pieces of information that they added when a monster card was drawn. They can also spend a resource to add +2 to the roll, and must narratively justify why. This is a fun way to call back to the earlier parts of gameplay, and manages to add the sense of a pitched back-and-forth battle to what is an inherently slow and pensive play format.
That said, there are some problems with this phase of play. Firstly, the number players have to roll to counter one of the monster’s attacks is 10, which is probably too high. This is, of course, subjective—if the goal of the game is to generate a feeling of slow, impending, and inevitable doom, it’s perhaps a good thing that the odds of beating the check are so low.* That said, the feeling that the resources are coming in handy to help defeat the monster is somewhat impeded by the fact that even if you spend a resource your odds of actually winning are still less than 50-50. Again, maybe having one’s resources chewed through one by one by this unstoppable monster adds to the sense of doom, but that only works if there is a sense of doom. I acknowledge that maybe the way I tend to play these games says more about me than it does about them, but a problem I’ve had with TQY and its derivatives is that they like to build a sense of foreboding through what is essentially yes-and improv. In my experience, this storytelling style tends towards the goofy (indeed, improv comedy is a common genre, and improv drama is practically unheard of). What this ended up looking like in our playthrough was a laser-eyed Godzilla/Lorax hybrid absolutely slaughtering its way through a city-sized MADD center and plowing through barrels of suspiciously meaty lemon curd on its way to eviscerate three ridiculous characters, winning, and then us players having to awkwardly figure out how to make an epilogue out of this jarring tone shift.
Another problem is the fact that the characters end up being less important in the final phase of play. When the monster attacks, it attacks the party as a whole, so a failure can’t, for example, result in the death of a player character. That makes the stakes of the final fight feel a bit abstract until it’s over. It also means that the character backstory cards end up feeling superfluous to gameplay, since there’s no way for them to influence the final fight mechanically.
The problem with hacking an existing game is that you might end up overlooking the ways your new mechanics interact with the old ones. TQY is ultimately not suited for character-based play, which is perfectly fine, but it’s incumbent on anyone who wants to make a character-based TQY hack to understand that and know what to change. Ultimately, the changes that TMCfU adds feel like too little and ultimately unsuited, like adding a little dollop of whipped cream on top of a beef wellington.
* The odds of beating a single check are 17%; 42% if the players spend a resource. Given that players need 5 successful checks to pass, assuming that they spend a resource on every single check, that’s still only a 20% chance of victory. If they only have enough resources to add to half the checks, the odds go down to 5%.
