Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Well-illustrated, quick-playing, easy-to-teach filler games? I will take a look at every single one, especially if it is from a team whose games I have enjoyed in the past.
The Creeps: The Monster-Trapping Game is the latest release from the team at Off the Page Games. Designer Jay Cormier, the man behind hits such as Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game.” and Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict, was kind enough to send a copy of The Creeps, which I think is the first small box/filler game Off the Page has released.
The Creeps is a family-weight card game with easy-to-parse area majority scoring tied to its hand management mechanics. It is such a family-weight game that it actually includes two sets of rules: a family version, and a full game. Now that I’ve played it using both sets of rules, I’m surprised to share that I prefer the family-weight version over the full game because of the sheer chaos unleashed by the full game version.
All About the Rikrop
The Creeps: The Monster-Trapping Game is a hand management game for 2-5 players. One of the game’s only noticeable issues is the playtime; the Family Game rules play out in 20-30 minutes, but the Full Game can take an hour. (One of my Full Game plays took 70 minutes, with only three players…that’s simply too long for a simple, two-round card game, but that can happen if even one of your players is a more deliberate, AP-prone decision-maker.)
The game, based on the three-book graphic novel series The Creeps by Chris Schweizer, puts players into the shoes of one of six different kid detectives working together to save Pumpkins County from the terrors of funny-creepy monsters like Treefoot (a monster so large that the card images only show Treefoot’s feet), the Fridge Goblin, and the Rikrop, which looks like an oversized bat that might be scared of itself.
Gameplay is very streamlined in the Family Version of The Creeps, with players choosing one of their four hand cards to place into one of eight columns, with each column tied to the research the detectives will do into one of the game’s monsters. Each card is split in half, with each half showing one of the eight monsters. When a card is played into a column, it is oriented to match that column’s monster, and players end their turn by taking one of the four face-up cards in a market below the play area to ensure they always have four cards in hand.
When four columns have at least four cards per column, the round ends and players score points for each monster in their hand that is a member of a scoring column.
The main way to score bonus points in the basic version of the game is to place character cubes on the notebook cards heading each column. By doing so—each column-heading notebook card has room for just one character cube—the owner of each cube will score double points if that monster is in one of the four scoring columns. Placing a character cube is an optional action on each player’s turn, but they have limited character cubes to place during the game.
So, the goal becomes clear quickly: influence the columns you want to see score, and when acquiring new cards from the market, try to get cards that feature not just one, but hopefully two monsters that look like they will score at the end of play. For new and/or younger players, The Creeps is very straightforward and does a great job of not overstaying its welcome.
The Full Game adds powers to the detective personas, simple stuff that spices things up just a tad. But it also adds Trap cards, which introduce a number of things to the Family Game: words, for one, because some of the Trap cards are so wordy that players sometimes needed a minute to digest what each Trap card would do before a round begins, and abject chaos, because The Creeps changes from a straightforward area majority game into a game that gets wacky fast.
Trap cards are not paid for when played; rather, one Trap card can be played by a player each turn as long as they still have a certain number of unplayed character cubes still in their possession. In my experience, that meant that players waited longer to play their cubes so that they could play their Trap cards at just the right moment…and, some of the Trap cards are comical in the way they blow up existing majorities, or feature the theft of cards by opponents, or move cards out of a player’s hand and into the market, massive in a game that is all about hoarding just the right types of cards to score at the end of each round.
Then, it doubles the number of rounds. If I told you that the Family Game was one round and the Full Game was two, that doesn’t really sound like much, right? Whoa, Nelly. At even two rounds, The Creeps runs a bit too long, and I didn’t even try the game at five players. The system doesn’t do itself any favors with the Trap card system, because it usually slowed rounds down a bit as column traffic shifted or different columns became unplayable (some Trap cards kill off the ability to add more cards) or players took more time to analyze their moves.
I Prefer the Family Game
As much as I love chaos in my game, The Creeps: The Monster-Trapping Game does a funny thing when it comes to setting expectations.
As instructed by the game’s rules, I did a play of the Family Game first, and I like what’s there. It is a decent filler well-drawn with illustrations with cute monsters and detectives. It is quick and feels like the kind of filler I would use to kick off a game night, especially a Halloween-themed game night with scarier stuff coming up later in the night. There’s enough strategic timing to be interesting to a wide range of players.
The Full Game is just that, a full game that plays in the time of a normal board game. The mechanics are still interesting, but some of the Trap cards change the way the base game plays enough to be a negative for me. It also changes my feelings on the detective powers themselves—I don’t have dozens of plays in to say this with certainty, but my guess is that I would rather have more Trap cards than less, and Jarvis Clark starts each of the game’s two rounds with an extra Trap card (three, instead of two).
In games with game-breaking powers, you would want more of those, right? On the one hand, I like that in The Creeps because the detective powers can be drafted, and the powers of Carol Pondicherry (love these names) and Mitchell Mayhew feel a little more interesting, along with Jarvis, than the three other characters in the game.
But the big reason why I prefer the Family Game over the Full Game is simply the length.
So, as a filler, I liked The Creeps and the plays were breezy. It’s a game that can work with my kids (ages 11 and 9) but also younger children as well. But it can also scale up to work with casual gamers too. Depending on your plans, give The Creeps a look!
