Secret Gamer Girl / SecretGamerGrrl / Googleshng / "Violet Hargrave" / Jacob Lawrence (Jake) Alley / Violet Cassandra Ocean - Delusional Zoe Quinn Stalker, Libelous Tweeter, Thirsty Gnome, Faux-Tranny Neckbeard Incel, Micropenis, "Known Troubled Person", Creator of "Massive vs the Masses", Self-Described "Noise Making Thing"; Lives in Niantic, CT

Hellfire said:
First conceptualized by Jake around 2003, The Massive vs. the masses was described as an asymmetric card game where one player controlled a monster with simple mechanics and the other had an army with potentially card combos, positioning requirements, and resource management. The ambitious hook for the game concept would be compatibility with many expansion packs, so you could go do a Godzilla vs. zombies, mad scientist vs. the army, and so forth. The modular hex grid playing field was designed to let you add on players/possibly expand the game for the expansions that never came. Jake's preplanned expansions were to be a scientist's drilling machine vs. molemen, and a survivalist vs. zombies.

Jake described The Massive vs. the masses as "asymetrical and goofy" in the CON Skype chat.


This is supposed to show all the contents that come in the box.
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A close-up of the pieces.
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The majority of the following comes from Something Awful when they played through two games of it in 2016, once for each side. In addition to the OP there was another person who showed up and had played this before. The artist Jake used is a goon and posted in the thread as well. The OP mentions having asked Jake about a game rule. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3765571

The objective in the base game is for the army to neutralize Gamorzilla by inflicting 100 HP worth of damage to it and can deploy various units based on their cards, while also protecting civilian assets. Gamorzilla wins by eliminating the civilians and can move around and attack through cards.

Each side has weakpoints that are put into the opposing deck, in the base game the Army can utilize Gamorzilla weakpoint cards and vice versa. "Let’s take this chance to explain the premise of Weak Point cards. You’ll notice the text box is Gamorzilla’s color, and has those nice jagged edges. The idea here is, these are cards which technically belong to your opponent’s set, but are mixed into your deck, so you can exploit their unique personal flaws. If we were mixing and matching multiple games in the MvM line, we’d be fishing these out and passing them around accordingly."

The Massive
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Gamorzilla is a giant amphibious lizard/reptile/turtle thing which can breathe fire. It starts off having just left the sea, with 100 hitpoints, able to move 5 hexes a turn over most terrain except buildings (marked by a 'B'), and attacks through playing a card each turn. Its weaknesses generally relate to its amphibious lizardy nature. It loses when it runs out of hitpoints. Gamorzilla starts with 5 cards, drawing and playing one a turn.
Unless a card says otherwise, Gamorzilla cannot enter an occupied space. Buildings block line of sight but it can see units inside them.
The Atomic Fire Breath's cone is two hexes next to Gamorzilla, then the three hexes in the same direction adjacent to them. You end up with a 3-hex triangle with Gamorzilla at one corner. (You can optionally not play a card, it was said in reference to Gamorzilla's turn but probably is a global rule) You may move before or after playing a card.

The masses player can move and attack with each unit they have during their turn. (Playing a card, moving/attacking with all units, and drawing a card may be done in any order once each turn.) As with Gamorzilla, you draw one card and play one a turn, and your hand size is based on how many civilians are alive, starting at 10.
Civilians:
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They have a move of 1 and a single hitpoint. The Army has one card in hand per living civilian (Starting at ten cards), discarding as they die, and losing when they're all dead. If you lose your civilian(s) on Gamorzilla's turn you discard at the start of your turn before anything else. If you kill any on your turn, you discard in that turn. Civilians do not get an attack. Walk type

The Army:
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These units can move and attack each turn from the moment they are deployed to the moment they are destroyed.

Tanks: Move 3 (Open, Tricky and Rubble), Range 3, Damage 3, Hitpoints 3

Helicopters: Move 2 (anywhere, can move through occupied spaces but not end turn on one), Range 2, Damage 1, Hitpoints 1

Fighter Planes: Move 5 (Must use full move, can only go ahead or the adjacent sides, crashes if no legal move) Range 3, Damage 2 (Only attack straight ahead but can attack mid move, buildings don't block LOS) Hitpoints 1

Infantry: Move 1 (Anywhere except Water) Range 2, Damage 1, Hitpoints 1, Walk type​

Scientist and inventions:
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The Scientist (move 1, 1 hitpoint) allows you to play weak point cards: If the scientist is dead, you discard them and draw again. As long as it lives, it can repair the Robot for 5 hit points if adjacent, as can the Lab until it gets reduced to rubble. Weak point cards are shuffled into the opposing deck, and that opponent can draw them as he would his own cards. Gamorzilla has no restrictions on when or how he can play the army weak point cards, beyond the usual 'draw one, play one' restriction. The exact wording of the scientist's special rule is as follows: 'If the scientist is destroyed, you may not play any weak point cards. At any point after the scientist is destroyed, if your hand contains one or more weak point cards you may discard them and draw new cards to replace them'. The Scientist does not get an attack. Walk type

The Robot has 10 hitpoints and can deal 5 damage. It can, like Gamorzilla, move anywhere except buildings: It has a move of 3, going up to a move of 5 if the scientist was alive when it arrived. It has a range of 1, unless it showed up before the Lab gets destroyed, in which case that gets bumped up to 2. "We can place it anywhere in the back row (with the implied exception of the Lab)"

The Death Ray has 10 hitpoints and deals 5 damage to everything in a straight line, and gets extra attacks, one each if the scientist and lab are still around when it shows up. It doesn't move, so needs to be deployed with care. It can only shoot along the 6 sides of the hex it is placed in.

The board:
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There are six kinds of space: Water, Tricky, Open, Building, Rubble and Railroad. Rubble hexes occur when the existing terrain gets destroyed.

Railroad hexes are special: To Gamorzilla, they count as Building or Open, but Army ground units can move from non-rubble railroad to railroad at half cost (Civilians/infantry/the scientist can move up to two, tanks up to six). Buildings block line of sight except for fighters. Units cannot share spaces or leave the map.

Buildings don't have hitpoints, nor do any terrain types. Any damage at all which is directed at them or at 'everything in a hex'/"everything in a space" is sufficient to destroy them. When a hex of building is destroyed it becomes a rubble hex

The Barracks are marked by the crossed rifles: Tanks and Infantry spawn here. The Airport is marked by the plane symbol: This is where fighters and helicopters launch. The Lab is the geodesic dome with the Erlenmeyer flask: The Scientist starts here. The small red stars are where civilians start out, the big one is Gamorzilla's entry. You can optionally deploy units from the 9 hexes at the back of the map.

If all hexes of the barracks/airport/etc. become rubble they will be unable to deploy their units from them and they instead deploy from the 9 hexes at the back of the Tokyo side of the map. They also deploy less as more of the building is destroyed, if you play Deploy Armor and three or four barracks spaces are free of rubble, you get three tanks. If two are rubbled, you get two tanks. If three, you get one tank. If all four, your only option is the always-available ones in the back row. "When a space has a rubble token on it, it’s considered a rubble space, instead of building, open, etc. Gamorzilla can freely move through rubble spaces, so first off, we now have an escape plan." Some masses units, like the tank, can "shoot the ground" to create rubble out of a building hex.

This is the initial setup for the base game.
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Jake demonstrated a sample game of it here: https://archive.li/eAm7t

​

The Masses always goes first, and spreading out the civilians is recommended by Jake. Their turn begins with a card draw, bringing them up to 11 cards. They can play one card per turn (unless a card says otherwise), before or after moving units.

The dark grey hexes are buildings. Red is the barracks. "We can’t actually deploy our tanks into these [red barracks] spaces, since tanks can’t ever enter building spaces, so instead, they appear anywhere outside. Every other railroad space (the lines cutting through the board on the diagram) counts as building for our opponent, but for us, they’re their own happy little bonus space type, so they’re fair game for our tanks."
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Jake's play is to use Deploy Armor, then move them forward to attack, one gets a movement bonus from the railroad hexes.
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The Massive's turn starts with a card draw. Jake explains Punt and the Rubble mechanics.
The short version of how this card works is that we pick a space right next to us, and kick whatever is on it off at someone else. The rest of this is just a bunch of restrictions on how exactly we can do this. A lot of it involves those cases where the thing we’re kicking doesn’t die from being kicked, which is so rare you never really have to worry about it. The most important thing here is that “in the same direction” bit. This means we’re using that “straight line attack” concept explained in the back of the basic rules. The short version is, if we’re kicking something directly in front of us, we’re not allowed to angle the kick and hit something off to the side. We also specify that the thing we’re kicking something into has to be “within our line of sight” after we go and take the thing being kicked off the board. This is a rather technical way of getting across the notion that while it’s totally cool to kick something way across the board into another unit, or a building, or any random empty space really, we can’t arc our kick up and nail someone off in the distance hiding behind a building. We can kick a building over onto someone standing behind it though (because we’re first destroying the building, then checking the line of sight for obstructions). The whole line of sight concept basically just boils down to the fact that hiding behind buildings can often keep you safe. All of the Army’s units (with the notable exception of the Death Ray) need to deal with this, but for Gamorzilla, it’s only an issue when it gets specifically mentioned on a card.

Now that we’ve picked apart the two wordiest cards in the game, we shouldn’t be getting slowed down like that anymore. The vast majority are phrased far more simply. In any case, we’re first moving up a bit, and then Punting one screaming little citizen into another, killing both. That’s always fun. Oh, and since this, like most of Gamorzilla’s cards, refers to damaging “everything on” these two spaces, we lay down rubble tokens on them (represented as yellow with black dots here). We’ll get into what’s so great about these really do later on. In this case, they’re pretty much just a nice visual representation of how smashed up the board is getting.
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The Masses turn starts with discards from the two civilians lost to Punt. 'Take note by the way of how we’re positioning these tanks. While we can enter the building/railroad spaces no problem, Gamorzilla can’t. This sort of positioning cuts off the easiest route to the citizens up by the barracks. Going the long way around still works, but we’re hoping to close off more next turn. We could get closer than this too, but then we’d be letting our opponent have a chance to smash us before moving." Take Cover is played, which prevents the first 5 points of damage to all their Walk types for the next 3 turns.
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The Massive used a Munch card to "destroy adjacent Flesh unit" and bypasses Take Cover's damage reduction. The card does not say it destroys "everything in a space" so it does not create rubble (although the civilian it was used on was already in rubble).
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The masses used a card to deploy the robot and moves in to attack. "We can place it anywhere in the back row (with the implied exception of the Lab, because this is yet another unit that can’t enter building spaces)"
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Jake and one of the SA users who had played this both said it can be tempting for the Massive to focus down army units, but the masses can potentially easily replace them. His move is to go trash the barracks instead with a cone attack, creating Rubble spaces and severely weakening Deploy Armor and other cards.
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The masses plays a nuke, they will have to wait until their next turn to target it, giving the opponent time to move to a beneficial location. "The tank that’s starting its turn in the airport is going to shoot the ground on one of our own building spaces, reducing it to rubble so one of the others can get in position. After firing, this tank is looping around to the left, to help wall off the route to our big citizen wad, and hopefully leave us with at least one living tank after the bomb hits."
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A Leap card is played which lets the Massive choose any Open/Tricky/Building/or Rubble space, destroys everything on it, and moves to it. It can not be used on a space occupied by something with more than 5 HP.
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At the very start of the masses turn they must decide where to target their nuke. A direct hit would do 30 damage and the blast would destroy the airport and 3 civilians. An indirect hit could do 20 damage and only kill one, or it could be dropped in the ocean to "just cut our losses" and not do anything with it, which Jake says is "just stupid." Jake decides to go for a direct hit.
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A weakpoint card is played that reduces Gamorzilla's movement to 3 and makes them choose to either draw a card or play a card, lasting 5 turns.
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The Massive moves around a tank then uses a Flight card, which deals damage in a 2 space line then flies 5 spaces in the opposite direction, destroying a tank and moving towards a civilian.
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The sample game ends with the masses playing a card that lets all Army units attack twice as many times this turn and trying to move units into attack range. Jake said there would be a couple more turns left, and the Massive player was likely to lose unless they have cards that would allow them "a dramatic escape, the destruction of these attackers, or both at the same time."
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11 cards were shown, Jake said that was about 1/3 of the cards in the game, between his sample game and the SA games we have 37 cards, unless I missed some. Each deck comes with multiple copies of some of the cards, as seen in the SA games. I didn't notice anything about how many cards are in each deck.
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Click to expand...

If some enterprising Kiwi were to make this an HTML5 or Flash game, would null host it here for member battles beneath the front page chat? With Jake's face on the monster of course.
:thinking:
 
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Hellfire said:
11 cards were shown, Jake said that was about 1/3 of the cards in the game, between his sample game and the SA games we have 37 cards, unless I missed some. Each deck comes with multiple copies of some of the cards, as seen in the SA games. I didn't notice anything about how many cards are in each deck.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how fun this would be, since that would be in the playing, but it at least sounds competently designed. How did Jake go from at least minimally professional output to become a mewling useless sadbrain who produces literally nothing but delusional, incomprehensible tweetstorms where nobody even understands what the fuck he's babbling about?

(And if he's unlucky enough that someone actually does understand it, they immediately call him a lying sack of shit.)
 
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AnOminous said:
I'm not sure how fun this would be, since that would be in the playing, but it at least sounds competently designed.
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In tabletop board games, there is an enormous gulf between "competently" and "well." The board is a visually cluttered and unaesthetic, and there are a number of arbitrary choices like Masses getting 10 card hands while the Massive only gets 5. The game being essentially decided by 6 turns by both sides might be good for repeat play & the randomization of the decks but positioning units seems impossible to strategize around drawing certain cards you may never see in a single game. It's a mish-mash of other games' mechanics, but they don't meld together in any particularly thoughtful or pleasing ways & probably has enormous balance issues(if anyone were actually able to play more than 2 games of it to begin min/maxing a particular side, playtesting was likely limited since Jake has no friends). Penny Arcade & PAX cover a lot of amateur board game developments including their own, and this game comes across as really clunky. I can tell that foreknowledge of particular cards & arranging the Masses around the bet that a specific card will or won't be drawn will decide games is more luck-based than Hearthstone. Also the 6 different terrains types and how they interact with one another & units for both sides is excessively complex on a hex grid, compared to something like Stratego. If you absolutely have to have hexes, I would have dropped the terrain restrictions unless it was a computer game that highlights valid squares for actions automatically for player ease. It likely is interesting as a newbie but falls apart with repeated play as game-winning cards kill the Masses' hand size & options or the Massive is out-resourced by meta strats that are statistically outperforming others. The fact that the Massive is literally Gamera & Godzilla smashed together is thematic for the entire package, just an unoriginal mix of needlessly complicated elements that don't end up resting well with one another.

Artistically, even the pieces are repellent in their non-specific shapes & look like traffic signs rather than a fighting force, and the box art is atrociously out-of-genre. It, and by extension Jake, is an unpolished but playable first attempt at a design. It's not beyond salvaging, but no one should be expecting it to stand up to more elegant designs of Settlers of Catan or Forbidden Desert.

It would be hilarious to get his reaction of us computerizing & playing his game on-site. He could never afford a lawyer, and playing his ideas without his permission would put him in quite the pickle of directing potential legal defense crowdfunders to his thread here and finding out were weren't profiting from it, just putting him between a rock & a hard place for the shitshow he would inevitably put on. And we'd probably re-balance and fix the art as a bonus :story:
 
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Haramburger said:
if anyone were actually able to play more than 2 games of it to begin min/maxing a particular side, playtesting was likely limited since Jake has no friends
Click to expand...

This was my main concern. Unlike a game where both sides essentially play by the same rules, something asymmetric like this seems very likely to have some dominant strategy one side can use to stomp the other routinely. It would take a lot of playtesting and balancing to make sure that isn't the case. Of course, Jake doesn't have this problem because nobody played it more than once or twice. If Jake playtested it himself, it was mostly playing with himself. In all possible meanings of the phrase.
 
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AnOminous said:
something asymmetric like this seems very likely to have some dominant strategy one side can use to stomp the other routinely. It would take a lot of playtesting and balancing to make sure that isn't the case.
Click to expand...
As a coop/pvp video game, Evolve went through a ton of balance updates because 4 humans vs. one monster was very difficult to find all the broken elements; it was in closed developement testing for a year, and the community spun their heads on how to abuse the flying monster and wreck players without even going for the map objective. Fun game though, if you could find players on the appropriate skill level. It took hundreds of matches to get a few good balanced games.
 
Haramburger said:
The fact that the Massive is literally Gamera & Godzilla smashed together is thematic for the entire package, just an unoriginal mix of needlessly complicated elements that don't end up resting well with one another.
Click to expand...

I can't get over him calling his monster Gamorzilla. That's the kind of thing a young kid would do.
 
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Haramburger said:
...& probably has enormous balance issues(if anyone were actually able to play more than 2 games of it to begin min/maxing a particular side, playtesting was likely limited since Jake has no friends).
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This is a huge risk in games, especially asymmetrical ones. IIRC, even Creature Who Ate Sheboygan (published by SPI and designed by one of the very best wargame designers ever, IMHO) was almost impossible for the humans to win, if the Creature had a very high Defense score and was Radioactive.
 
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Jake went incredibly quiet for the past two days, making a total of 3 tweets, and spending most of his time just retweeting/'liking,' he's back to actively Googleshng commenting on random shit.
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TWITTER
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Cow crossover. I wonder if Kluwe still talks to Jake, since so many other CON cliquesters have cut him off now.
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Maybe he spent the day talking directly to his long-distance waifu. Normally I'd say no one would put up with Jake's level of grossness, but he's angling for second concubine status to a woman whose husband and first concubine are already quite homely, and who collects simultaneous relationships the way children collect Pokemon.
 
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Kosher Dill said:
I think "Redshirts" was the thunder-stealing game. After "Massive" was a massive flop, Jake's "Red Shirt" game was supposed to dig him out of the financial hole he found himself in.
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It's both, though mostly Monsterpocalypse which he got extremely butthurt over. It came out around a year after Jake's game and Jake has claimed it has the"same premise/exact unit list/art style/general overall appeal" from Massive vs.masses. He chimped out and wanted to sue them in 2010 when he found out Monsterpocalypse got a movie deal, because Jake believed he owned the intellectual property, despite "kaiju" games already existing and both games having different mechanics. Jake was mad because his game was "wallowing in near total obscurity" and he didn't want to have to explain that his game was out before the Monsterpocalypse game and movie. https://archive.fo/3zWcb

His Red Shirt concept came around 2007, once he got the Massive vs. masses made and sales were not as he expected this was supposed to be a quick game he could produce to get some cash coming in. https://archive.fo/D0yBV He tried to get a popular webcomic artist to do the art after striking up a deal with him at NonCon in 2008, that guy did to him what CHELSAY and so many others would do in the coming years and stopped replying to Jake. Four years later, Redshirts came out and Jake, without playing it, chimped out and accused them of stealing his idea while claiming he had been just about to take out a loan for it. https://archive.fo/ODnfA#selection-1850.1-1860.1 Jake blamed the inability to get a single playtester as the reason he hadn't been able to publish Red Shirt. https://archive.fo/ODnfA#selection-3175.1-3078.21 He later said he was tempted to see if the webcomic artist had involvement with Redshirts. https://archive.fo/Fx9dH#selection-5331.0-5326.12 He additionally blamed a "long string of artists" "flaking out" on him. https://archive.fo/Fx9dH#selection-6505.143-6505.230

Haramburger said:
It's a mish-mash of other games' mechanics, but they don't meld together in any particularly thoughtful or pleasing ways & probably has enormous balance issues(if anyone were actually able to play more than 2 games of it to begin min/maxing a particular side, playtesting was likely limited since Jake has no friends). Penny Arcade & PAX cover a lot of amateur board game developments including their own, and this game comes across as really clunky. I can tell that foreknowledge of particular cards & arranging the Masses around the bet that a specific card will or won't be drawn will decide games is more luck-based than Hearthstone. Also the 6 different terrains types and how they interact with one another & units for both sides is excessively complex on a hex grid, compared to something like Stratego. If you absolutely have to have hexes, I would have dropped the terrain restrictions unless it was a computer game that highlights valid squares for actions automatically for player ease. It likely is interesting as a newbie but falls apart with repeated play as game-winning cards kill the Masses' hand size & options or the Massive is out-resourced by meta strats that are statistically outperforming others. The fact that the Massive is literally Gamera & Godzilla smashed together is thematic for the entire package, just an unoriginal mix of needlessly complicated elements that don't end up resting well with one another.
Click to expand...
As mentioned above, he did end up with nobody to playtest with by 2012 or earlier, but he did claim to be demoing Massive vs. masses and getting playtesting done at NonCons and possibly other venues from 2004 to 2007. https://kiwifarms.net/threads/secre...wrence-jake-alley.23920/page-464#post-3289802

In the lolsuit threat thread someone remarked that Massive vs. masses is "ultimately unbalanced on the Army side once you know how to play them." Jake's response was that the Massive side has a "MUCH steeper learning curve" and "you can totally win half the time (well, 60/40 anyway) as Gamorzilla with experience." He added that others who "don't play strategy games" frequently complained about the "time it takes to realize infantry are better at blocking movement than dealing damage." https://archive.fo/3zWcb#selection-4611.0-4582.7
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