Home Is a “Mechs vs. Kaiju” Tabletop RPG Where the Battlefield Is the Battle

By Cameron Kunzelman | September 4, 2025 | 1:29pm

Images from Home's website

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Home Is a “Mechs vs. Kaiju” Tabletop RPG Where the Battlefield Is the Battle

A giant monster looms on the horizon. It has appeared out of a rift in space and time. It’s headed for your home. The only thing between your loved ones and this big ole creature is you—and your giant mech. You are piloting a giant robotic human and you are going to beat the hell out of this monster, and then you’re going to chase its brethren back into the bowels of another universe and beat the hell out of its buddies. This might remind you of the movie Pacific Rim, but it is also the tabletop game Home, a “mech x kaiju mapmaking RPG.” You can play it alone or with some friends. It’s sick.

I’ve been writing a lot about some cool solo games recently, and Home has been on the pile to check out for a while. I have to admit that I enjoy the big monsters. I think they’re neat. Home provides several mechanical and narrative tools to generate a situation where a big monster comes and you have to figure out how to deal with it. This, to me, is what gaming is all about. It’s a relatively simple game that asks for some six-sided dice of different colors, something to write with, and a few papers, and from that it provides a generation mechanism for a world, some mechs, some kaiju, and the blow-by-blow of what happens when those two things crash into each other.

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In Home, you have a few options for generating these things. You make your home, which is to say you mark up a map with the locations of important things, and then you either generate or choose some names and important characteristics for those places. If you’re playing solo, you do this using the power of your one brain; if you’re playing with a group, this is an opportunity to communicate and engage with each other, building a whole continent or world that you then set out to defend from the creatures from beyond. To do this, you pick playbooks (like character classes) and then define your mech from there.

The mechs in the game are broadly archetypal. You create a pilot by naming them and locating them in the world, and then you pick a big machine they operate. The Engineer, for example, has an impressive array of possible weapons (singularity missiles, for example) and the Outrider is known to come from a home with “everdark cities.” All of these mech characteristics are arbitrary in the sense that they only have meaning when you narratively summon them to give contours or context in a moment, and Home is engaging in a serious effort of prompting you to think about the world as a living, cooperative space that you might want to protect with your mech and your pilot’s life.

The mapmaking doesn’t stop here. The actual play of the game is about drawing spaces, defining fronts of combat in both your home and through the rift in another world, and then playing out the battles that happen there and the destruction that is wrought. What is produced by the end of the game is an artifact of a war won or lost (and it can be lost; the kaiju are strong and the battles are hard).

Home takes an interesting approach to battling. While mechs and their enemies have health points, and there are attacks, it does not really play out like most TTRPGs might. Instead, the game leans hard into the description of the battle and where it took place. The Blockade, for example, is a standard place in the game where a massive wall is being constructed to keep the monsters at bay. To prep for the battle, you draw things on the map—upgrades, for example, and methods that your home used to create the blockade originally. These are represented visually on the map not merely as things you thought about but as locations that meant something and had a context with the other parts of the world. This is, to my mind, the brilliance of the game—the battlefield is the battle. The context is the event. Attacks happen, health pools go up and down, but the map is where all the answers are given and all the decisions are made.

Playing the game progresses across maps, and there are a number of different systems are leveraged to add specificity to the mapmaking. You can do oppositional research on kaiju, and you generate the kaiju themselves in order to help you better narrate the battles that you’re engaged in. All of this is neat, but it also feels a little bit extra to me; I think the interest in Home is drawn on sheets of paper, and the value of its play is shown by learning more about the world you’re making. I think this plays in an interesting way with a single player, and I think it could be something very special for a group of four, especially if they wanted to play a science fiction roleplaying game in the aftermath of the defeated kaiju. If those players could manage it, that is.

Home is obviously deeply inspired by Pacific Rim, but it does something different with the concepts, asking players to make a world that they defend with their words and their maps. There’s nothing else quite like it.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.