It's not often that I play a bad game. Normally I'm playing games that I've played before or that somebody else vouches for. In this case, somebody picked this one up at a convention and we read the rules and played - all learning together.

Big mistake.

Monster Mayhem seems pointless from the beginning. The idea is to play through 5 turns trying to increase your "craving" total by devouring victims on the board. Pretty straight forward. The problem is that it lacks anything that could really be considered strategy or even fun for that matter.

You start by building the board. Hex tiles that serve as starting positions for our monsters, the victims and as escape points for victims as well. This takes a lot longer that it seems like it should. Each hex has no number designation so you are left to count rows and columns to try to place hexes where the rules show them to be based on the various configurations.

Half of your turn is taken up by moving the victims randomly. The other half is taken up by trying to track down said victims and devour them. You can play "screw you" cards pretty much whenever you want to hose the other players. Unfortunately, none of these things are particularly fun to do. You have no choice in what to do with the victims. You draw an escape card and move where it tells you to. You have a little more control over the monsters. You roll dice to figure out your move, decide where to go and if you reach a victim you can try to devour them. The crux of this is more dice rolling and strategy is limited to deciding whether you want to spend any of your current craving points to boost your dice rolls.

We made it through two turns before deciding that it wasn't going to get any more fun.

Bad games make me sad. Spending hours trying to play them makes me mad.