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The Godzilla RPG captures the pulp adventure side of a kaiju story

IDW Games puts human relationships and big action at the heart of Godzilla: The Roleplaying Game.

PAX East 2026 Godzilla — Image credit: IDW Games/Popverse

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Fri Mar 27 2026

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The star of Godzilla movies and comics usually isn’t the giant radioactive lizard himself. Instead, it is the people and their reactions to the kaiju invasion that make the stories worth watching, and that is what makes the upcoming Godzilla RPG such an enticing game. As it storms through the last days of its successful Kickstarter campaign, we got the chance to play Godzilla: The Roleplaying Game at PAX East 2026 and came away loving its pulp action feel.

The two-hour demo that we played at PAX East was an insight into what IDW Games imagines a Godzilla story should feel like. Everything is designed around moving the action forward. The characters in the one-shot adventure were part of a team recruited to be humanity’s defense against the appearance of giant monsters. We had a former star quarterback-turned-field commander, the kaiju-mutated human looking for a cure, the power armor-wearing shocktrooper, and the scientist obsessed with finding the truth behind these destructive creatures.

What makes the system work is that, like any good disaster movie, it isn’t just about the disaster itself; it is about the relationships between the people dealing with it. Each character has rivals and allies, each giving potential bonuses when they work together. The action is largely loose and open to interpretation, and the group we played in naturally escalated into a Rule of Cool mindset. A slow, cautious exploration of a research facility eventually became a shootout escape aboard a helicopter as Godzilla, King of Monsters, loomed in the distance. It was a quick taste of what this system promises and it left us wanting more.

Godzilla: The Roleplaying Game sports a simple system you can play with an ordinary deck of playing cards, but it lends itself to big, action-fuelled moments worthy of a kaiju adventure. The Kickstarter, which has already raised more than three times its initial goal of $60,000, is open until April 2, 2026.

The gaming industry has come a long way since Pong blew all our minds in the 70s. We've got everything you need to know about the next big thing in games. Of course, Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be the big game of 2026, but there are plenty of other games coming out between now and then. Here is our starter guide for every gamer:

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