HOME Mecha X Kaiju
At the beginning of 2026 I bought a game on a whim from an Instagram ad based on a couple minutes of reading about it and the fantastic art shown off in the advertisement. Okay I also bought it because it was cheap and Print + PDF copy was $15 at the time. That game was HOME: Mecha x Kaiju a game by Nick Gralewicz and published by Deep Dark Games. I've had a chance to play it a few times all the way through, both solo and with friends and I've got some thoughts so lets talk about HOME.
If you're not familiar with HOME: Mecha x Kaiju it's a small game, the physical book clocks a mere 36 pages, with big aspirations promising the experience of mecha pilots fighting a series of Kaiju in a desperate fight for the survival of their world. HOME is a game that doesn't just wear it's obvious inspiration from Pacific Rim on it's sleeve, HOME is cosplaying Pacific Rim on the unofficial Pacific Rim float in the thanksgiving day parade. A self described Map Making RPG, HOME hammers... home (I'm not sorry) it's aesthetic with stunning art depicting kaiju that look ready to give Gypsy Danger a body slam, and mecha that would fit right into your favorite Anime.
Home delivers on that promise with relatively simple mechanics that boil down to editing the collective map, editing your mecha, making a kaiju, and rolling a handful of d6. The actual mechanics of rolling dice in HOME is simple, you have two sets of d6, boon dice and bane dice. Basically good dice and bad dice. You roll a number of dice based on how many boons or banes you have, if any of the bane dice roll the same number as a boon dice it cancels out that boon dice and whatever is left of your boon dice determines your result. From there it's a stepped success system so you have your good success your not so good, and your oh no I'm dead result. The mechanics around getting more of each dice is weighted pretty heavily towards getting more banes as you go through each of the three kaiju fights known in the game as fronts. This means when you have a couple bad rolls your mecha pilot gets less and less able to handle what the game throws at you while at the same time the Kaiju get stronger and stronger.
Where HOME breaks down is in just how tightly they packed this game. 36 pages printed on sheets about the size of your average paperback with included character sheets, map, and artwork is not a lot of room for the edge cases or story bits.
This is 5% of the book.
In one of my early games of HOME my die rolls were unfortunate (that's code for god awful) and I racked up a lot of banes early and was never able to recover. I lost every fight with the Kaiju and had my section of the map obliterated, while watching the other players have fun back and forth fights and even winning some by the skin of their teeth. There being so little contained in HOME meant that I struggled to find the fun in getting repeatedly stomped by kaiju. At the time I felt like I was watching my friends get to play their cool Pacific Rim Gypsy Danger story while I was that 3 armed jaeger that is first to die fighting on screen.
Home's entire direction at the end of each kaiju fight, which they call a front, is to "Envision your home in the aftermath of the front. Imagine your pilot, their connection, the cities, or the hole in the world where they once existed." That paragraph is it in it's entirety, the next sentence suggests checking if anyone needs a bio break before starting the next front. Once I learned to be in the right storytelling space to play HOME I realized that "envisioning" is where the fun really lies. The collective story telling as you add or cross out things on the map, of what happened to your pilot and their mecha, of describing how the special features of the kaiju make sense of the die results.
In another game of HOME a player asked me to use the Team Up special move. This move gives you an extra Boon die to roll against your kaiju and you work together to establish what it looks like. They rolled no successes and, after a few jokes about whiffing attacks, we had the idea that what if my pilot simply had never shown up to the planned ambush. Then in the next front doing the preparation moves, which is how you get more dice to roll fighting the Kaiju at the end of the front, I rolled so badly it added 2 bane dice to my future rolls. A little discussion later and we decided that a rogue element in their nation had attacked mine in retribution for not showing up to the ambush. Two bad die rolls and suddenly we had political intrigue, we had blood feuds, we had capital L Lore.
Without any sort of GM to shape the game for you HOME does ask all the players to flex their story telling muscles a bit more than your average RPG, but I think if you come into it really focusing on that story telling aspect of it, more than the game play part of it, you too will have a blast. Ultimately that means I believe HOME: Mecha x Kaiju is a game worthy of it's tiny space on your shelf.