Kaiju Table Battles is one of the most intensely personal games I have ever played. It’s like stumbling across a friend’s open diary and reading a few fervid paragraphs before recognizing the artifact for what it is. The impulse in that moment, in our culture, is to clasp the diary shut, and likewise clasp shut the memory. We shy away from earnestness so readily. How, then, do we respond when the earnestness stands on a stool and demands to be seen?

Amabel Holland has always been a designer who stretches and strains the medium to its absolute boundaries. Kaiju Table Battles takes both to their limit. Maybe beyond the limit. This is a legacy game, envelopes and all, which peels itself apart layer by layer, revealing new diary lines and rubber-suited monsters alike. Along the way, it questions the very foundations of play.

Monster in the streets, monster in the sheets also.

Let’s peel through the layers. That’s probably the easiest way to get into it.

Here is the surface. Kaiju Table Battles is, as the name leads one to suspect, about gigantic creatures slugging each other, or shooting beams at one another that splash together at the midpoint when they collide, or performing judo moves to propel one another into nearby apartment buildings.

Except even the surface is depicted with a degree of deliberate artifice. Because these are not literal monsters. Nor are the apartments populated with terrified occupants. These are besuited actors from classic kaiju cinema, presumably sweating themselves to death under all that rubber. They lurch and waddle with a gracelessness that betrays their true nature. The buildings are balsa and spit, meant to splinter. The special effects, were they transposed into the game, would be film exposures or other pre-CGI magic, asking us to become active participants in the fiction rather than grappling with the uncanny valley computer generation tickles into our brains.

Put another way, this is a game in which one pretends to be a pretender. This double-layered remove has a function. It invites the player to play a role, to play along.

Playing along is the crux of Kaiju Table Battles, because the game itself operates in a limbo mode between cooperative and competitive. On the surface — there are those layers again — your goal is to trounce the opposing duo of monsters. Both players draft two from an ever-growing cast. But there’s something else to consider. Before the battle commences, you must also agree on an objective. This objective isn’t the usual sort of thing, “control the hill” or whatever. It’s a collaborative venture that both players are asked to complete despite slugging and beaming and waddling one another to a pulp. Destroy all the buildings. Land attacks that deal a certain threshold of damage. Align your monsters so that one can shield the other from a particular attack.

It’s important to note that these objectives are not naturally occurring. Played straight, it might take a dozen plays before they’re accomplished. Maybe more. They represent yet another layer of artifice. An objective might require me to trigger a certain attack at the exact moment that both of your kaiju are standing adjacent to one another, both with the requisite number of dice on the requisite actions. Only then will my laser beam be absorbed and redirected. In the wild, it would require my forgetfulness and inattention for this to happen; I would see the dice on your monster mats, would refrain from launching an attack that could be flung back in my face only under those exact circumstances.

But I must launch that attack. That is the goal we agreed to. The artifice. The mode of play, wandering somewhere between our genuine efforts to win the battle and our desire to complete the objective and thus open the next envelope. We are set against ourselves.

Monster! Literally.

It’s a confusing way to operate. What are we? What are we supposed to be doing? It’s easy to imagine a version of Kaiju Table Battles that was more cooperative. In which we draw objectives to present the fiction of dueling monsters, where defeat means shooting a scene in which we never redirect the plasma breath back to its belcher. Failure in such a game wouldn’t be a failure to win at a duel, but failure to make the duel convincing.

That, of course, is precisely the point Holland is driving at. To clarify the players’ roles would be to rob them of their uncertainty. The roles in Kaiju Table Battles are confused because the topic is confused roles. By now it’s common knowledge that Amabel Holland is a trans woman. Every piece of Kaiju Table Battles is wholly a part of her: the confusion of the play mode, the reassuring nesting of the actors-within-the-monsters, the snippets of self-loathing and eventual self-acceptance one uncovers between battles, the envelopes. The idea that this is an envelope-opening legacy game because that is how self-discovery works, one battle against the self at a time, one paradigm shift at a time, one terrifying realization that you are not who you once were at a time.

I’ve asked the question in the past about where a game begins and ends. Do we also play the game when we read or explain or listen to the rules? What about when we set it up or put it away? When we discuss it afterward? When we get jazzed about a cool moment or nurse a resentment toward a friend for always getting rules wrong in their favor? Legacy games sharpen this conundrum because their best moments, their most interesting moments, occur when we aren’t playing the game proper. After the winner has been assigned, that’s when the board is sharpied and stickered, when the envelopes are torn open, when deceased cards are torn apart (or, in more responsible modern form, hidden away for the game’s eventual reset), when new content marches forth for our pleasure. Rob Daviau, the inventor of the legacy format, has talked about how people undergo measurable effects of pleasure when opening a game — dilating eyes, electrified skin — only for the rush to evaporate like a spill of alcohol in the sun the instant we shift from discovery to learning the rules. Daviau intended the legacy format to extend the box opening, so to speak. To reward players over and over. To make the setup and breakdown as much a part of the game as the gameplay itself.

I raise the question now because Kaiju Table Battles is perilously easy to bifurcate into the game and the not-game. Here is the game: a serviceable but incremental dice-rolling and -assigning system that can very well break down if players approach it more competitively than cooperatively, which again is the point, which also happens to be uniquely fragile. Here is the not-game: the collaboration between players in which we agree to make a show of competition but really strive to achieve those shared objectives, because our ultimate goal is not victory but progression. Put another way, growth. To see this duel through to the moment of clarity and joy on the other side, when we open an envelope and bring ourselves one step closer to the completion of Kaiju Table Battles as a whole.

The game is cooperative-ish despite being competitive-ish.

In this play mode, we are not two players competing. We are the bicameral halves of a single whole. Hemispheres of the brain, paradigms in friction, the self-before and the self-after in contention. We are one person in two players in four actors in four rubber suits. That fragmentation, that crisis of identity, of objective, is the game.

I can hear the objection now. “But is it any fun to play?” It’s an entirely reasonable question. We’ve been enculturated to ask it. Because the game and the not-game are securely divided in our minds, it’s hard to imagine a version of this game that persists beyond the monsters on the map to include the envelope-opening and diary-reading that comes after. Perhaps even further than that. Am I playing the game right now, as I roll over my thoughts and feelings? I think I am. I expect that’s the only way that one can sensibly consider Kaiju Table Battles a game at all.

Of course, this also makes Kaiju Table Battles an unusually delicate plaything. On the table, it’s one of those games that can drag on if one player decides not to play along. The moment the balance between competition and collaboration tilts toward the former, it begins to splinter. To win, I must defeat your monsters. But the nature of the game’s movement system can produce situations where your “best play,” if we’re gauging the best play by the need to win this individual match rather than by the desire to open the next envelope, is to waddle your sole surviving monster out of range of my sole surviving monster’s attacks. The result is a Keystone Cop pursuit that ends only via exhaustion or chance.

This, too, is the game, because in such a moment we embody the crisis that defines the whole experience. In some cognitive models, consciousness is essentially a tiebreaker, a means of flipping the coin when Buridan’s Donkey can’t decide between drinking the lifesaving water or eating the lifesaving food. When the brain stalls, what we call the Self emerges to resolve the stalemate.

Kaiju Table Battles endeavors to create that Self in much the same way. The organism develops the Self because there is no other means of resolving its competing needs and urges; the players become a Self because there is no better way to determine how to best play a game that refuses to clarify whether it’s cooperative or competitive. Perhaps this process is a synthesis, with both players agreeing on the ideal course of action. Or maybe it’s equal parts birth and annihilation, as one gets their way and the other succumbs to exhaustion. Or maybe it doesn’t happen at all. Maybe one player decides they’re sick of the gameplay. Maybe half of your brain goes to sleep. Maybe the dysphoria is irresolvable. It took me multiple months and two play partners to finish Kaiju Table Battles. That, too, is the game.

An early battle is an opportunity for Monster to stand on a roof.

Have we unpeeled enough layers? Have we at last become ourselves? I hope not. I hope we never stop becoming. Kaiju Table Battles is an unusual thing. It is as much a question as anything else. It asks us to consider the identity of its actors, its monsters, its players. The Selves it produces. I will never play the game again. But what we consider the not-game, I expect, I hope, I will never stop playing.

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A complimentary copy was provided.