Burst bubbles and not hearts in The Kaiju Love You!

The accessories, aids, and assorted accoutrement of RPGs are fascinating to me. Alone amongst the family of tabletop games, RPGs are the only ones not defined by what you use to play them. Board games have boards, card games have cards, and minis games have minis. Most RPGs, on the other hand, can be played with just paper, pencils, and dice. Of course you don’t have to take this bare bones approach, and there’s the scope to go from simple battle maps all the way to fully sculpted terrain and miniatures to create epic set piece battles of Mercerian proportions, not to mention all the virtual options available for remote gaming needs. There are advantages and disadvantages to all approaches, but I’ve discovered a game that has the absolute best battle map I’ve ever come across.

The game? The Kaiju Love You!

The map? Bubble wrap.

InnocentGoblin’s The Kaiju Love You! is a short, sweet zine game about kaiju battling and romance. It takes the classic Godzilla arc of going from a city’s destroyer to its protector a step further by asking “What if the friendly kaiju started taking the humans they saved on dates?” If you’re suddenly imagining Mothra taking a human for a picturesque flight while A Whole New World plays, you’re in the target audience for this game. Beyond the adorably silly concept, something about the game resonated with me on a deeply personal level. An ungainly 6’4” transgender woman being drawn to a game about giant monsters finding love? Who’d have thought?

The Kaiju Love You! sits firmly in the realm of beer and pretzels games. It’s intended for a GM and a small number of players, and doesn’t come with any material to help you prep (the entire zine is fifteen A5 pages long) but its simple, high concept nature means a creative GM could go from whipping it out to having it at the table in half an hour. Spawning your own kaiju can be done in minutes, and is mostly a case of picking a type — like Brutal or Radioactive — deciding which type the kaiju is weak to, designing their appearance, and adding some flavour to their attacks.

The core structure is a straightforward loop. Enemy kaiju show up, PCs fight them off and attract admirers in the process. Admirers can then be romanced and taken on dates, building up a relationship level with them. It does have a mechanical payoff at a certain point, giving kaiju bonus Shields which help protect them in combat, but the joy is in coming up with an array of NPCs who are eager to go on dates with giant, city-wrecking monsters. Sooner or later, enemy kaiju are going to show up to wreck the romantic vibes and the PCs will have to stomp off and stop them, providing more opportunities to gather admirers, or show off to the ones they already have.

There is one glaring flaw in The Kaiju Love You!, flashing red like the weak spot on a giant end of level boss monster, which is that your kaiju’s stats don’t actually matter. Kaiju are assigned ratings in Destruction and Romance, with the two stats adding up to nine. The issue is that these stats are checked by rolling 1D8 and trying to score the same as the stat. Hitting the number exactly gives you a standard success, one lower is a slightly worse success, one higher a better one. The issue is that your chance of rolling any given number on 1D8 is always going to be the same, so while a Destruction 2, Romance 7 Kaiju might look like more of a lover than a fighter on paper, they’re equally capable at both tasks. The only exception is if you set your two stats to one and eight, at which point you’d be worse at both things due to not being able to roll lower than one or higher than eight.

As much as it’d be remiss of me not to bring this up, I don’t think it’s a huge concern. The Kaiju Love You! is a tiny zine that gives you a bare bones mechanical framework to tell silly, heartwarming stories. At every step of the process you’re asked to be creative, to add your own flavor, to take the premise and run with it. There’s no reason why the stats should be any different. Sure, the aforementioned kaiju may be equally competent at both smashing and smashing mechanically, but you can still describe them as being clumsy in the streets and smooth in the sheets.

Speaking of sheets (and smooth segues), the one spot of real design brilliance in The Kaiju Love You! is the use of a bubble wrap battle mat. Due to their immense size, kaiju struggle to move around the city without destroying it. A sheet of bubble wrap provides a handy grid layout for the city, but it also permanently marks buildings as destroyed when kaiju move through them. Each bubble is one building and one space of movement for a kaiju, who can move up to eight spaces in a round. Early battles are a tactile and auditory delight as you pop, pop, pop your way through the city. Sure, you could achieve the same thing with any old grid, but it’d lack the satisfaction of real, physical destruction.

Destruction which is permanent.

You can’t unpop a bubble and the buildings in The Kaiju Love You! can’t be rebuilt. Destroying buildings creates Fear, and a high enough Fear level causes the military to be deployed and get in the way of your dating life. Once a building has been destroyed, the space can be walked on without causing additional damage, and by the time the PCs have a couple of battles under their ginormous belts, they’re going to care deeply about preserving the city. Their romantic interests live there! You can’t be trampling on the block with the ice-cream parlour where you took Matthew for your first date! Even more important is protecting your kaiju’s partners, who have their home buildings colored in with a marker. Heroically charging in and protecting your beloved will see your relationship with them instantly max out, while allowing the building to be stomped flat with them in it has predictably dire consequences, especially if you’re the one who did the stomping.

Far from being a gimmick, the bubble wrap cityscape is surprisingly poignant, with its permanent reminder of damage caused by friend and foe alike. It reminds us that forging relationships, much like fighting giant monsters, is a messy business. Your first clumsy attempts are likely to be destructive, leaving permanent reminders of hurt caused by you and by others. As time goes on, you learn from those mistakes, stepping more carefully, with hard-earned wisdom and precision, buoyed by those you have let into your life. With enough persistence, you’ll find those special people who support you and are worth protecting in return. The Kaiju Love You! and so do they.

Or, y’know, bubble go pop. POP! POP! POP! POP! STOMP! ROAR!