Thursday 14 September 2017

Gangs of Mega City One review.

Hello and welcome back to my blog. 

A few weeks back I spotted a copy of Mongoose's Gangs of Mega City One on evilbay. The game is a small gang srkimish

As many hardened readers of this blog will know I am a huge fan of 2000AD's Mega City One background and Judge Dredd. It is a major inspiration for the Utopia city faction. I was tempted to buy the game, sealed as new but for £15.00 it seemed too good to be true. Especially as every out of production and classic game fetching sily prices. I have been burnt by dodgy eBay sellers in the past.

I have wanted this game since it came out in 2004 but sadly funds would not allow me to purchase it even if I had enough figures from my Combat Zone and Babylon's Burning collections to start playing right away. Throwing caution to the wind I hit the Buy button.

A couple of days later the parcel arrived. With a mixture of excitement and dredd (did you see what I did there?) I opened the parcel to find a complete game, still sealed.

With some delight I ripped the cellophane away and dug through my treasure.
So what is there?


A rules and background booklet.


Some dice & 12 unassembled plastic gang figures.


Some templates & a bunch of card terrain (buildings, cars and street furniture).


A paper play mat.

Not bad for the asking price and it is rare to get a bargain on evilbay these days.

The rules seem pretty straight forward and have a campaign section so you can grow you gang and raise their reputation. One nice rule is the Call the Judges rule which allows you to set the law on your opponent.

What is missing from the rules are rules for vehicles, cursed earth gangs, robots, Cocalids and ape gangs.

Reading previous reviews from back in the day many herald the GMC1 rules as Mongoose's attempt at a Necromunda style skirmish game. That is true in some respects but the background is much, much richer. It is generally unknown but 2000AD's Mega City One was a large inspiration for Confrontation (Necromunda' s forefunner) and early 40K.

In the last 40 years Mega City One has seen much wackiness and gaming the mean streets would give a lot of fun. There is the undercity (sorry Nercomunda Fans, MC1 had one before 40K was born), the cursed earth, crazy gangs, ape gangs, crazies (called futsies), death judges from another dimension, wars with other mega cities, block wars and features many cross overs. The Aliens and Predator vs Judge Dread are examples of such cross overs. MC1 was also used to parody many current events and celebrity stories if the time. Then there is the Burger Wars andDinosaurs out in the cursed earth.

Shame the game and the later edtiton (The Judge Dredd game) fell by the wayside. With the background offering so much scope to feed the imagination these games could keep a club gaming for years.

Now for me I have to find the expansion book "Death on the streets" next. Anyone have a reasonably priced one for sale?

Thanks for reading. Take care out there!

1 comment:

  1. wow,nice purchase!! building templates are very cool,good to take pictures with miniatures and models. ew

    ReplyDelete