Debtzilla Review

I don’t know about you, but I love a good monster movie as much as the next person. There’s just something about the impending doom and battle for survival that keeps me on the edge of my seat the entire time. So what happens when that theme is transferred to a board game? Keep reading to find out!

Welcome to Banana Republic – a nation rampant with corruption, crime, and lawlessness. Villains are on the prowl, scamming helpless citizens and taking all of the wealth for themselves. Several brave citizens have decided to fight back as vigilante heroes, and take back control of their nation. However, fighting crime is an expensive endeavor, and lying in wait beneath the city, feeding off of the expenses incurred by our heroes, a great monster grows in power….

Disclaimer: We were provided a copy of Debtzilla for the purposes of this review. This game is a complete production, so all of the components pictured below are what you will find in the box. I do not intend to rehash the entire rulebook, but rather provide the general ruleset and overall gameplay. For a more in-depth look at Debtzilla, pick up a copy from your FLGS or directly from the publisher. -L

Debtzilla is a cooperative game of deck-building and dice rolling in which players are trying to defeat lowly villains, save helpless citizens, and ultimately the monster Debtzilla himself. To setup the game, each player takes a meeple and 5 dice in their chosen color, and receives 10 Income cards to become their starting deck. Next, set up and prepare all of the different Boards of play – Working, Shopping, Vigilante, and Boss. The Working Board contains Income cards, with which players will build their decks. The Shopping Board contains Gadget cards, with which players will buy cards to manipulate their die rolls in the Vigilante Phase of play. The Vigilante Board contains Villain cards to be defeated and Citizen cards to be saved. And finally, the Boss Board contains Debtzilla himself!

Each round of play consists of 4 different phases: Working Phase, Shopping Phase, Vigilante Phase, and Resolve Phase. Since this is a cooperative game, there really is not turn order. Rather, all players are free to communicate with each other and take their actions simultaneously. During the Working Phase, players first draw 5 cards from their Income decks, and collect resources for the drawn cards. Players may then choose to acquire a new Income card from the Working Board, or repay a Debt card and remove it from their hand. Acquired Income cards go into your discard pile, to be shuffled in to your Income deck for future turns. In the Shopping Phase, players may choose to buy a Gadget card. Purchased Gadget cards go directly into your tableau, not your Income deck, and will be used in the Vigilante Phase to manipulate dice rolls. The Vigilante Phase allows players to attack Villains that are scamming the citizens of Banana Republic. Rolling a set number of dice, and modifying rolls with Gadget cards, players have the ability to send Villains to jail and save the citizens. Any undefeated Villains in this phase will scam their corresponding citizen, and citizens may become Bankrupt if scammed too much! The final phase, Resolve Phase, gets the game set up for the next round. Replace any jailed Villains or bankrupted Citizens with new cards from their respective decks. Increase Debtzilla’s health by the set amount, discard cards from your play area, and trigger any Boss Events if required.

If at the end of the Resolve Phase, there are no Villain cards remaining, the Boss Fight is triggered and players now fight Debtzilla himself. The phases of play are carried out in order, with some slight changes, and instead of fighting Villains, players now directly fight Debtzilla. If players defeat all of the Boss Fight cards before all Citizens are bankrupted, the heroes win the game! If all Citizens are bankrupted, or Debtzilla’s health reaches 99, the city falls into a Debt Apocalypse and players have lost the game!

I’ll kick off my thoughts by saying that Debtzilla is a well-executed cooperative game. Players really have a great opportunity to collaborate and discuss strategies and game plans throughout the entire game. Since all turns are taken simultaneously, it is easy for everyone to cooperate for the greater good. All players are involved in every step of every phase, even if you are not necessarily acting yourself: your input is still valuable to the team. The player interaction is positive and plentiful, and I love that about this game. Unfortunately, on the flip side, one thing I didn’t really enjoy about Debtzilla is that even though it is a deck building game, there really is not a lot of deck building going on. You can only acquire one card per turn, and there are only 8 different cards in total, so there’s really not a lot of variety to incentivize building up your deck. At a certain point, you’ll pretty much have all you need in your deck, and won’t need anything else. Especially since the cards in your deck only give you resources, not special abilities for use in later phases. The deck building aspect just feels kind of mundane and not fully realized to me.

Debtzilla really is more of a dice-rolling, luck-based game. Yes, you can build your deck how you want, and you can purchase and utilize different Gadgets each turn, but when it all comes down to it, how well or poorly you roll dice in the Vigilante Phase will determine how the rest of the round will go. You could have collected lots of resources and purchased some powerful Gadgets, but if the dice are not on your side, all of that strategy beforehand kind of gets thrown out the window. You are at the mercy of the dice in the end. BUT the cooperative aspect of Debtzilla can alleviate some bad dice rolls! Certain gadgets allow you to manipulate die rolls of your allies, so just because you roll poorly doesn’t necessarily mean that the team is done-for this round. Just be warned, there is quite a large luck aspect when playing this game.

Let’s talk components. As with my review for Cryptocurrency, my biggest qualm is with the game boards. Instead of being one large board, each phase board is its own individual entity. That just makes for more components to setup than necessary, in my opinion. Again, that has no bearing on the gameplay at all, just makes some extra work that doesn’t need to be there. The quality of the components is pretty good. The boards and cardboard chits are nice and sturdy, the cards are colorful and of a decent quality, and the dice/meeples/cubes are well-produced. All in all, a great quality game.

So how do I feel about Debtzilla? Overall, I think it’s fine. As someone who enjoys deck building, I was a little disappointed that that mechanic isn’t as involved as I had first thought. The luck involved in the dice rolling makes the game feel a little too random to me, but the fact that the game is cooperative overall alleviates much of my discomfort. Maybe you love dice rolling, but I am just a notoriously bad roller, so that is where my hesitations stem from! I think it’s neat that Debtzilla lies dormant until all Villains are defeated instead of being available for battle from the start. It kind of gives the game a sense of urgency to defeat Villains before Debtzilla can become too powerful to defeat. The game feels like it has a plot that is building to a final battle, and that theme really transfers well in this game. All in all, Purple Phoenix Games gives Debtzilla a roaring 6 / 12.