by Emanuel Class

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our latest look inside the Monsterpocalypse universe. In this Insider, I’m going to look at the latest and wildest kaiju to ever arrive in the Monsterpocalypse!

At the beginning of the design phase, we set out with a few goals in mind: 1) Let players play with more of their collection; 2) do something fun that’s never been done before; and 3) make it available to all players. After more than a year of designing, developing, testing, and refining, we failed in exactly what we set out to create. Let’s look at exactly where we crash-landed with this particular planetfall.

Okay, yes, I know—that’s a lot of text for Polymorph. But to make a monster that could turn into other monsters, we needed to dig deep into our understanding of kaiju design to pull it off.

Here’s how Zeerox works.

During the List Creation Phase of the game, adding Zeerox to your force activates its ability Gene Hunter. After adding Zeerox, you must choose an agenda and choose legal models for that agenda. Next, you add two more monsters to your list from your chosen agenda, as the Gene Hunter trigger references and proxies. It’s good to have those monsters’ cards handy, by the way—you’ll likely need them. After adding those monsters to your list, you continue to build your list normally per the dictates of the format you’re playing.

Your first Gene Hunter monster is placed in a separate “zone” next to the battlefield designated the “Strike Zone” monster. Your second Gene Hunter choice is placed in a second zone designated the “Miss Zone” monster. Place these monsters and their cards in these designated zones for reference.

During your monster activations over the course of the game, you can use Zeerox’s Polymorph to replace Zeerox with a copy of your monsters. When you use Action: Polymorph, roll the dice spent for the action to determine the results of the action. If you roll a strike, you replace Zeerox’s model and card with the monster in the “Strike Zone” and the same thing for a miss: roll a miss, replace Zeerox’s model and card with the monster in “Miss Zone.” This lasts until the beginning of your next turn or until an attack hits Zeerox and is resolved. If the die roll is a Super Strike, you may choose which monster to Polymorph into. For determining whether Zeerox polymorphs in the alpha or hyper form of the Zone monsters, Zeerox’s alpha and hyper forms correspond to those: if Zeerox is hyper, use the hyper form of the Zone monster.

Zeerox has the ability Transcendent in alpha to prevent you from intentionally hurting yourself to get your polymorphs in hyper. This solved the abuse cases that turned up with this rule during playtest!

Finally, keeping Zeerox in its native, non-polymorphed form can be an interesting choice for players, too. With Copycat on its brawl and blast attacks in alpha and all its attacks in hyper, Zeerox can make some really interesting and mind-bending plays. Copycat allows Zeerox to choose an enemy monster within 4 spaces. You can then use the chosen monster’s dice and abilities in the corresponding attack type as one of this monster’s attacks.

There’s a nearly endless list of combinations this monster can bring to bear. And no matter what your agenda, this psychic slug can add quite a bit of unpredictable mystery to your Monsterpocalypse tabletop. Now…I challenge you to find the most insane combinations with this monster you can think up and tag us @privateerpress with the #Kaiju on any social media platform, and let us know what you dream up!

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