Geeking With the Wife – Episode 4: Bulls and Bears

“How much have you spent on this, anyway?”

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Kate tends to use Zor-Maxim (~$8 for both forms) as her monster. In her standard unit pool are a handful of S-Type Shinobis ($1.97 each), a couple of Katanas ($0.67 for grunts, $0.87 for elites), some Sun Fighters ($0.67 and $0.77, respectively), a pairing of a grunt and elite C-Type Shinobi (same cost as Katanas), two Sun Drones ($2.97 each), an Interceptor ($3.47) and a Shadow Gate ($3.47). Left over in the plastic baggie are some duplicates of the units on the board and a Mecha Task Master ($2.47). The baggie is nondescript – a sandwich bag with freshness lock. The pieces don’t get jostled around in daily use, so we haven’t resorted to purchasing a fishing tackle box or a hobby store organizer just for our Monsterpocalypse pieces yet.

All told, the Shadow Sun Syndicate/Ubercorp baggie holds around $30 in units. There’s perhaps half again that value in the Terrasaurs/Empire of the Apes baggie. We keep the monsters in a separate box, with two Zors, three Terrasaurs, and an Ape making up our playlist.

It cost more than $30 to get those Shadow Sun units, perhaps closer to $45, but the value for some of the pieces has gone down with the release of the new set, Monsterpocalypse Now. Not all pieces decline in value – Nuclear Power Plants go for far more than their original asking price, for example. But the market is definitely fickle.

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Kate’s taking this week off, or at least pushing our game until after I need to turn in this article. I’m playing my dad on VASSAL, the online program that lets board gamers play from across the country (or even across countries – ah, the wonders of the internet). His chosen faction is G.U.A.R.D., giant robots that represent the good guys, the Protectors faction. Someone on the official boards once noted that the Protectors get a bonus from securing the building known as Bank Headquarters – it’s obvious they know what’s important to protect. I’ll avoid the timely political commentary and just let the irony stand on its own legs.

When my dad visited last summer, I played him in two or three games of Monsterpocalypse. I’d cashed in early Christmas present-ing from my parents and brother to fill out my growing collection and wanted to show him the new hobby. He really enjoyed the game, the pieces, the father-son time, and he asked me to help him get into it as well, perhaps to play with my mom, perhaps to find a group in the Chicago area. I followed the same route for him as I did for myself – purchasing a lot on eBay that provided figures from all six (at that time) factions, expecting that he’d play around with each and find one he liked. He chose G.U.A.R.D.

We’re moving slowly, using few pieces, getting used to both the game itself and the interaction with the electronic representation of our miniatures. He secures a Bank Headquarters, gets an extra P-die for it because of his Protectors agenda, then gets another extra P-die because his monster is Defender X. Consider it an investment in the future. I move in close to threaten his buildings with Armodax, a monster diametrically opposed to Defender X’s defense-of-the-city flavor. My dad uses his greater mobility to get on my far side and smash Armodax through a couple of buildings in the center of the map. So much for protecting. So much for the financial district.

Rise and fall, my friends. Rise and fall.

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When I was in high school, I convinced my parents to let me take the money in my savings account and invest it in a newish company called America Online. AOL is a bit of a joke these days, but at the time it was the smartest game in town, dumbing down this crazy internet thing for average users all across the country. It was accessible, and it was a smart buy. The stock doubled and split about five times during the period I owned it, paying for no small part of college and letting me reinvest in some other stocks.

When I was in college, I got conned into investing in a company called Wave Systems by a former teacher of mine. The company has solid concepts, but the method by which I was induced to buy was a pyramid scheme that I just didn’t recognize. I bought shares at $10 each, saw them climb as high as $50, then watched them fall to $5 each within a matter of weeks when the tech bubble burst. I got rid of most of the shares at a loss and held onto a few in the hopes it would rise from the ashes. There was no such luck, and I recently sold the remaining shares to give us a little extra cash for a down payment on our house in Martin.

Rise and fall. Then pick up and keep going.

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My dad and I finish a few more turns, then save the game to finish later. We’ve been playing and talking for an hour, running Skype in the background and chatting about things besides Monsterpocalypse. It comes somewhat close to the real experience, but it’s not quite the same. The talking is good, being able to switch windows and see the look on his face is great, but the game, however tactical, is lacking something: plastic.

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So how does one acquire Monsterpocalypse figures? The first, and most daunting, way is to purchase booster boxes. Each contains a random selection of some number of “common,” “uncommon,” and “rare” figures. If you’re purchasing for all available factions in a set, like I started off doing, or if you have someone with whom to trade unwanted for wanted pieces, boosters are a good way to go. Normally I’d recommend buying these at your local game/comic book store. That wasn’t an option for me at first. I literally couldn’t even get the local comics place to let me do a demo of the game. I later discovered another store about thirty minutes away that had a small amount of Monsterpocalypse material, but interest there was low as well. Still, it was a place to obtain boosters of the later sets.

I haven’t really answered the question yet. How does one acquire Monsterpocalypse figures? You buy them. I got lucky early on, finding a guy who was unable to unload six Rise boosters on eBay and sold them to me for $5 each. When I ended up pulling a couple of units like Meat Slaves (as gross as they sound – also, do NOT Google this term) and Power Pods that can go on the secondary market for $8-10 each, I figured I’d made a good buy. Those are the purchases you feel good about, when you can buy cheap and sell high (or not sell at all, as it were). I then traded figures I didn’t want for figures I did want. Unfortunately, I was stupid about one trade in particular. That Armodax I’ve been playing with? I traded a Power Pod ($8) and an Oil Refinery ($6) for him ($11). I didn’t feel so good about that one later on.

Once you know which factions you want to play, you can start to fill out your collection with purchases of single units. See the various costs throughout this week’s column for prices at Team Covenant. TC also offers “faction packs,” two of which I’ve pre-ordered for the upcoming “Big in Japan” expansion pack. For $40, I’ll get 9 figures from each of two factions (Empire of the Apes for me, Ubercorp International for Kate). Some of these will inevitably lower in value, some will inevitably rise in value. That’s the market. I’ve also ordered a Mechathugrosh to add to the number of monsters in Kate’s arsenal, though I expect that when it arrives we’ll have a “hostile takeover” match between the two corporate factions.

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What else could I buy with $40? I could go to Amazon.com and get 8 of their $5 mp3 albums. I could import the new Mumford & Sons CD twice, only I don’t have to now that it’s Stateside. I could get just shy of 4 trade paperback collections of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8. I could take Kate out for appetizers and dessert at Radici, a few blocks from where we live. I could become the proud owner of an entire set of Airbake cookie sheets and pizza pans (I make a mean homemade pizza). I could add to our list of non-Monsterpocalypse board games.

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So why do I choose to buy 18 plastic miniatures instead of these items? After the game with my dad, I offered to send him the second and third strategy guides so that he could find out about more pieces than the ones he owns. He declined, said he’d just go get copies of the guides on his own. And more miniatures? He’ll probably end up getting those, too, even though we’re just playing online. Of course, I still haven’t answered that question.

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I know why Privateer Press doesn’t mind VASSAL. It’s because all of us who really enjoy this game, from the casual players to the tournament competitors, don’t just like crunching numbers and forming strategies. We like to imagine, to pretend. We do that best with miniatures in our hands, and we won’t give them up in favor of a free but incorporeal system. We like to think that our little monsters really are hundreds of feet tall and are crunching, not numbers, but cities beneath their feet. We like to smush them together. We like to make the flying ones fly and the walking ones walk. We can see the lasers being fired, hear the roars being roared. It’s like being a kid again. And there’s always a bull market on childhood imagination.