Kaiju Khaos

Kaiju Khaos is a turn-based strategy game where two players build giant monsters and battle them to see who's monster is the strongest. Along with Evan Barker, I took part in the development of the mechanics of the game.

On a player's turn, they can either move or attack an adjacent target. The players move around the board by moving a number of squares equal to their speed. Attacking buildings grants part cards. The most important mechanic of the game is the part card mechanic.  The player can either attach them to their kaiju to strengthen it and give it special abilities, or sacrifice it to attack the opponent's monster. Some cards, when used as fuel to attack the opponent, will add additional effects to hinder the opponent. Finally, a player can destroy a nuclear power plant to heal up. While other buildings will be rebuilt by the city, nuclear power plants are one-time-use.

When a monster attacks another player, it deals damage equal to its attack value minus the opponent's armor value. The game ends when one kaiju is reduced to 0 hit points.

I helped develop the gameplay mechanics for this game. Most of my time was spent balancing card power and how much movement a player had vs. how many actions they could take on their turn. In the end, we realized that a player could run in, attack, and then run away if they could attack and move in the same turn. We wanted combat or building destruction to be a commitment on the player’s part, so we ended up making the player choose between movement and attacking during their turn.

The project shown in the video above was the end result of our experimentation with the board/card game genre, which ended after a few weeks of development.