Battle Masters board game reboot puts Godzilla on the front lines

Battle Masters, the cult-classic tabletop wargame best known for taking over entire kitchen floors in the mid-1990s, will be brought back to life by Restoration Games (Fireball Island: Curse of Vul-Kar, Return to Dark Tower, Crossbows & Catapults: Fortress War) as Battle Monsters. The reboot is produced in partnership with MonsterVerse, the joint venture between Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures that has produced recent hits like Godzilla x King Kong. The final product will be funded via Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2025, and feature the iconic kaiju. The announcement was made last weekend during PAX Unplugged and on social media.

The original Battle Masters, designed by Stephen Baker, made use of many different miniature sculpts from Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battles – a feature that it shared in common with Baker’s other beloved board game, HeroQuest. And while that game’s owner, Hasbro, elected to just file off Games Workshop’s serial numbers with its 2020 reboot, Restoration is taking the franchise in a completely different direction with an all-new IP featuring towering kaiju.

Of course, that actually makes a lot of sense when you consider the original Battle Master’s scale. The game famously came with five-foot-square game mat. That means unless you had a full-size ping pong table or a truly massive dining room table, the original had to be played on the floor.

Little is known about the reboot at this time, other than that it will feature “the Titans of the Monsterverse: Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Kong, and Mechagodzilla.” But as with all Restoration products, it’s being designed with modern players, not necessarily collectors, in mind. To that end, fans should expect a solution that will better utilize today’s most common formats of household furniture.

“Not the [Twister] mat from the original,” Restoration said on X. “(We figured most of our fans don’t really want to play [on] the floor.) But, yes, [a] very large mat [will be included].”