Beastformers Role-Playing Game

When the Beastformers line spun off from Takara's Transformers franchise in 1988, it was rebranded with a "Role-Playing" game gimmick. Packed with each figure in the line was a pamphlet describing the rules to the Beastformers Role-Playing Game, where kids faced off against each other to see who had the strongest team!

Fiction

Beastformers pack-in catalogs

Since time immemorial, six elemental Gems left by the Three Wise Ones kept the powers of Fire, Wood and Water in balance across the planet Beast: two Gems for each power, one encouraging and boosting an element's power, the other inhibiting it. However, the war between White Leo and Alligatron's forces, which had been further ignited by the intervention of the Decepticons and Autobots, threw the Gems' balances off. After the war had ended, strange phenomenon and unnatural natural disasters began to spring up across the globe.

Combing through ancient texts, the Beastformers learned of the Gems, and that only the five strongest Beasts could hope to combine each set of Motion and Stillness Gems to restore balance and set things right. Thus they gathered their forces once again to battle, only this time to assemble the mightiest warriors on the planet in order to save it.

Game Rules

• Prepare your army
  • Each player gets two six-sided dice.
  • Each player picks five Beastformers/Laser Beasts from their army and lines them up. This is the order they will be played in. Each Beast must be unique, no doubles. (You can also play a shorter 3-on-3 game.)
  • Give each character a weapon. While any weapon will do, it is ideal to give each character their personal MVP Weapon (matching the molded number on the Beast and weapon), which will give them more attack power in certain circumstances. Weapons cannot be swapped out mid-battle.
  • Place the Beasts' arms in a downward-pointing position. Their arm positions, aka "Fighting Pose", are used to indicate their hit points, aka "Energy":

5 points - Both arms down

4 points - Left arm horizontal

3 points - Both arms horizontal

2 points - Left arm up

1 point - Both arms up

0 points - Both arms up, face down, Beast is defeated

• Battle play (normal)
  • The active Beasts (first in line) activate their Battle Emblem rubsigns to determine who goes first. Fire beats Wood, Wood beats Water, Water beats Fire, Burstsun beats all three. In the event of a tie, turn to manual Rock-Paper-Scissors.
  • The attacker and defender both roll their dice. Whoever gets the higher number wins. If the winning Beast is using a weapon other than their MVP, reduce the loser's Energy by 1 point.
  • When a Beast's energy reaches 0, remove them from play, preferably into the prison of the winner's Fortress playset (sold separately).
  • The loser moves to the next Beast in line. Do the Battle Emblem thing again to determine who attacks first and continue.
  • According to the pamphlet, the first side to capture three Beasts wins... which makes selecting five Beasts peculiar. This might be an error. Play to five if you want.
  • Also according to the pamphlet, the winner of the full game can pick one of the loser's Beasts to keep? Um. Yeah. Skip this one too if you want.

• MVP Weapon modifiers
  • If a Beast is equipped with their proper MVP Weapon, they get a few extra options/powers.
  • In a normal turn, if their winning dice total matches their "M-Number", then they do extra damage on top of the normal 1 point. M-Numbers and bonus damage can be found on the MVP Weapon page. Numbers harder to get deal more damage! The fanciful descriptions of what these MVP attacks do don't really enter into things, but they sound cool!
  • On the attacker's turn, before they roll the dice, they can declare "Miracle Power." Then if they get their Beast's M-Number on the roll, their Energy is restored to 5 (the rules do not indicate if this is in addition to or instead of attacking; presumably instead of). Obviously, some numbers are harder to get than others. But that's the tradeoff: hit harder or heal easier.

Notes

• Yeah, it's pretty simple. A lot of the pamphlet text is very redundant to drive points home. Feel free to make up your own more elaborate version.
• Matching the Beasts with their MVP Weapon plays into the fact that throughout the entire Beastformers franchise, individually-sold figures had a chance to not come with their proper weapon. This was inexplicable in the Transformers-branded part of the line that predated the RPG.
• While that "winner gets to keep a toy of their choice" thing does seem a bit harsh, these toys were sold pretty cheaply, at a mere 200 yen a pop (250 for Laser Beasts), and in gashapon capsule machines as well. For reference, the Mini Vehicles were priced at 500 yen.
• The pamphlet also notes that there is a thing called the "G(old)-Power" (Gパワー G Pawā), involving "Lamé Weapons" (ラメ武器 Rame Buki), noting "Its power is not yet known to anyone..." and that's it. Which probably means there were plans for chromed weapons as giveaways that were never realized.