Monumental Board Game First Impressions

Monumental is a very pretty deck builder and civilisation game with a lot of minis.

But, is the game any good?

Monumental is a next-generation civilization game with a mix of innovative mechanics taking the best of the deckbuilding and 4X games.

Monumental Game Play

This is just a basic overview and far from comprehensive but there is enough info to help you understand how the game works.

You start by setting up a map from a scenario book and covering it in Barbarian, Free Town, Production, and Market tokens. The map sizes change from 2-5 players so pick the right one for your player count.

Then you create a deck of Development cards divided into 3 eras that contain Building, Knowledge, and Wonder cards.

You each choose a civilization and take all of their related cards and minis. Take the 15 Civ cards and deal 9 into a 3×3 grid face up to make the City. The minis go on a Capital city space on the board.

A game is played over 4 Phases: Activate City, Take Actions, Replenish City and Replenish Display.

To Activate the City, choose one Row and one Column in the city and tap all of those cards. Then gain the resources shown in the top right of all activated cards.

Actions

Next, you Take Actions and you take any of the 10 available as many times as you like in any order.

• Acquire Development Card: Just like any other deck builder, pay the cost in resources in the bottom right of the card in the development row and put it on top of your deck.
• Acquire Wonder Card: From the development row like any other card but you put it next to your City instead.
• Complete Wonder: Pay the cost of a previously acquired Wonder. Gain the completion bonus and put the Wonder card on top of your deck. Add a token of that Wonder to a province on the board.
• Develop Cultural Policy: Pay 1 Culture to put any Cultural Policy face up next to your City and gain the one-off effect. Each additional Cultural Policy costs 1 Culture more than the previous but you gain the one-off effects of each Policy developed so far.
• Move Military: Move 1 unit into a connected province you control per 1 military spent.
• Conquer Province: Move 1 unit into an adjacent province you do not control for each Military spent. You must move in the number of units equal to the Terrain Defence + Building Defence + Unit Defence in that Province. Take the Province token and gain the benefit.
• Construct Outpost: Return 3+ units in the province to the Capital, and place an Outpost which has a defence value of 3.
• Play Explorers: Move 1 explorer into an adjacent province for each Military spent. An explorer can either take a Market token from that Province or take a Production token.
• Activate a Card Effect or Cultural Policy Effect
• Make Scientific Progress: – Pay 2 Science to draw, resolve, and discard the top card of your deck.

Tidy-up Phases

Then, you Replenish the City by discarding the activated cards and refilling it from the top of your deck. You also discard any Basic resources (Production, Science, Military) but keep any Culture, Gold or Production Tokens to use in the next turn.

Finally, Replenish the Display if one was taken this turn by shuffling the row up and revealing a new card. If one wasn’t taken you discard the rightmost card shuffle up and refill.

Play goes clockwise

Game End

When the last card is placed in the Development display, players take even turns and the game ends.

Players gain points for Knowledge Cards, Wonder Cards, Cultural Policies Developed, and for the number of Controlled Provinces.

Players also gain points from having the most Knowledge, Provinces, Wonders, and Cultural Policies and the player with the most points is the winner.

Theme

Each of the races works thematically as you would expect with the Greeks using their minds and the Danes using their muscle etc

Buildings, Knowledge cards, and Wonders all give thematic actions too.

Yeah, any race can build any Wonder but at least they come out in a decent order from Ancient at the start of the game and more Modern late on. This is one of the big issues I had with Tapestry and their time jumping deck.

Setup & Rulebook

The setup appears fiddly but 90% of that is putting the board together and putting tokens around the place. Building the player decks is OK and the other player stuff is fine, except for putting rings on the minis but more on that shortly.

Getting the minis out of their place in the box takes a while too as well as setting up the decks.

The rulebook is thankfully pretty good with the rules in general. It’s terrible at specific rules, examples, exceptions, and going into detail. I still don’t understand the difference between barbarians and Free Towns, other than the token image.

Component labelling is non-existent too and the only way you can identify some tokens is by matching the count against the component list.

Components & Artwork

The components are nice, obviously. Everything is really good quality except for a few things.

As nice as they are, two minis arrived damaged (and were replaced) and I’ve had one break on me since. I was pushing the base into a ring and the shock of it caused their arm to fall off. They’re very delicate.

This means you have to keep them in their slotted space in the box insert which hinders setup and teardown time. It also means I have to have two boxes rather than everything condensed down into one.

Update: This will now be 5 boxes after the second Kickstarter!

Update: I even went as far as to buy the replacement disks on the second Kickstarter to use instead of minis so I have that option should I play more solo games.

The basic resource counters are plain disks of 3 colours, the Construction counters are plain orange cubes and the faction score counters are tiny little cardboard disks.

Update: These were upgraded at a cost in the second Kickstarter

Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by CMON?

But, the art is really nice though with the card art particularly exceptional.

Check out the components from the base game and the first expansion here:

Monumental Kickstarter Unboxing

Monumental: The Lost Kingdoms Kickstarter Unboxing

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s fairly easy to teach. At its essence, it’s desk building like Hero Realms with simple dudes on a map combat like Small World.

There are a few rules which are easy to forget but repetition will sort those out.

It’s open information which will really help with accessibility. There are only a few actions and most are very straight forward so there is that.

Monumental Summary

So I’m writing this almost exactly 2 years after playing a quick solo game. I played with the continuous rules which cut out the downtime, the biggest complaint from the game when it came out. I never played the old rules, but I played with someone that has and they loved the continuous rules system.

So, the game…

The deck-building ‘cross-tap’ system works well. You can see which cards you need and what they’ll get you but you have to be very careful. Too many resources, or not enough, and they’re wasted. Basic resources are not carried over at the end of a round so you have to take it all into account.

Culture is hard to come across and Gold can be too if you don’t get the right cards.

Moving around the board is simple and as I mentioned earlier it’s similar to Small World. It’s not about dice rolls or stats, it’s just about me having more than you. Get enough resources to move enough dudes into a region and it’s yours.

This is a very nice game that reminds me of Tapestry. A civ game with a lot going on where you gain resources, then take time spending them all. The bot players work similarly in both games too.

Monumental Solo Play

There is a card-controlled bot player you can add to any game with 1-4 players. They are easy to control and work with 2 flips of a deck of cards that you resolve left to right, top to bottom.

They’re very simple and don’t take too long once you get the hang of it. Due to it being so light it is fun to play but the time it takes to set the game up just isn’t worth it for me, solo anyway.

Update: Using the disks rather than minis should help this

It’s the same for Tapestry, the games are similar weights and the bot player plays in a similar way. This is easier, but both games are better multiplayer.

Jesta ThaRogue