Monumental

• Designer: Matthew Dunstan
• Publisher: Funforge
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 30 min / player
• Played with review copy provided by Flat River Group
• Amazon affiliate link – https://amzn.to/3u1jkoF

In Monumental, each player will control a civilization that will evolve through his city: a grid of 3×3 cards (coming out from the player’s starting civilization deck) that can each be activated to gather various resources such as Science, Military, Production, Culture, and Gold that will allow them to trigger many actions. But there’s a trick: one cannot activate all their cards at once, which means that tough choices will have to be made each turn in order to select the cards that are the most needed.

The resources gathered from the activated city cards will allow the players to acquire cards from a common pool, allowing them to get improved buildings, technologies, wonders, etc. and therefore to leverage their civilization deck to new heights through more and more efficient card combos. As the common pool of cards progresses (either as players have acquired cards or because they didn’t – which leads to one card from the pool to be discarded per turn), the game progresses through eras. Medieval cards are better than classical cards, and industrial cards are even better, but of course those cards are more and more expensive to acquire.

A modular board, at the center of the table, holds each civilization’s army. The board is made of Provinces to be conquered. Unoccupied Province’s inhabitants are barbarians who will provide resources to the player who defeats them. Holding a conquered province also brings victory points. The player with the most impressive civilization at the end of the game will be remembered for all time (and they also win the game!).

To setup the game, you build the map based on the player count and prepare the development deck, stacking the three eras on top of each other. Each player chooses one of the 5 available civilizations and takes all of the bits for it.  The deck of 15 Civ cards is shuffled, and a 3×3 array is dealt out for the initial City layout, the rest of the cards becoming a draw pile. If you deal a knowledge card, put it in the right place and then draw a regular city card to place on top of it.  Form a culture deck and put it facedown next to your city.  A display of development cards is dealt to the table with the rest of that deck being nearby to be drawn from.

At this point, I’ll mention that I’ll only talk about the Continuous Play Mode – which is NOT even in the retail rulebook!   The rules for this can be found online and came in one of the expansions.   “This way of playing is arguably more tactical and engaging” as it “aims to reduce downtime in Monumental, especially at higher player counts”.  Umm, yeah, I can’t think of any reason to not use these rules. Ever.  I had already been warned from previous reviews of the large amounts of downtime, so I’ll heed the advice of respected gamers and only play with the new rules.  If you want to print them out – https://www.funforge.fr/kickstarter/monumental/Continuous_Mode/Monumental_Continous_Mode_US.pdf

The game is played in rounds, with four phases in each round: Activate City, Take Actions, Replenish City, and Replenish Display.   

Activate City Phase – each player examines their city and chooses one row or column to activate, and rotates these cards 45 degrees – you will turn cards in 5 positions this way.  If there is a Knowledge card underneath a City card, it is also turned and activated.  All players gain any resources found in the upper right corner of their activated cards.  There are three types of basic resources in the game: Production, Science, Military as well as two special resources: Culture and Gold.  It is always important to remember that you cannot save basic resources from turn to turn – if you don’t use them this turn, you lose them.    However, Gold and Culture are kept until used.

Take Action Phase: In this turn, starting with the starting player and then going around the table, players choose a single action to perform.  If you use an action on a card, place a marker on the card as you can only use the card once per turn.  Possible actions are:

• Acquire a Development Card or Basic Building Card – pay the cost found in the lower left of the card (production for a Building card, Science for a Knowledge card), place it face down on TOP of your City deck.  If you get a Wonder card, pay the first part of the cost in Production and mark payment with a counter on the card
• Complete a Wonder – pay the second cost on the card. Then immediately gain the bonus written on the card.  Take the matching Wonder token and place it on any Terrain tile you control, giving that tile +2 Defense.

• Develop a Cultural Policy – choose any Policy card from your Policy deck, paying a number of Culture equal to the number of Policy cards you have played.  Tile the cards so you can always see the instant bonus effect at the bottom of each card.  When you play a Policy card, it goes on top of the stack – and the ongoing effect on the current card is the only Policy in play for you.  However, each time you play a Policy card, you get ALL of the instant bonuses at the bottom of all your played Policy cards.
• Conquer a Province – you control a province if you can move enough troops into an enemy territory equal to its defense value. They can come from any adjacent territory or chain of territories that you control, and it costs 1 Military to move a unit into the next adjacent territory.  If you conquer a Barbarian or Free City area, take the associated tile and choose one of the two bonuses on the back.  If you defeat an opponent, all their units return to their Capital tile.
• Move Military – simply pay a Military to move a unit; they can only move through provinces that you control
• Construct Outpost – return 3 units from a province you control to your Capital and build one of your 2 Outposts. This gives +3 to the defense of that province.
• Play Explorers – spend a Military to move one of your Explorers – if you move into a Market Province, take one of the market tokens.  If you move into a space with a Production token, take the token and then you can spend it at any later point in the game. Place a marker on an Explorer you use as they only get one action per round.
• Use an activated City card or Policy effect – resolve the text on one of your activated city cards or your topmost policy card. Place a token on that card so that you only do this once per round
• Make Scientific Progress – Pay 2 Science to draw the top card of your city deck and then resolve it. Discard the card after it is used.

There are also free actions that can be done – generally things triggered from your chosen main action.  In short, if something you do immediately grants you some followup action, you are allowed to take it.

Continue around the board with each player taking an action on their turn.  At any point, you can pass. If you do, you are done for this phase. Return any unused basic resources to the supply.  Your turn is skipped for the rest of the phase, and the phase ends when all players have passed.

Replenish City Phase: All players discard their activated cards from their City, remove any player tokens from the board, and each player adds new cards to their City, always going left to right, top to bottom.  Again, if a Knowledge card is dealt, place it in the card slot, then keep drawing until you get a regular city card to go on top.

Replenish Display Phase: If fewer cards from the Display were taken than the number of players, discard the furthest X cards until you reach the number of players.  Then, deal out new cards from the Development deck to restore the display the the number of cards established in Setup.

The game continues in this format until the end game is triggered – when the Development Deck has 3 or fewer cards in it. At this point, there is one more round in the game.  After this round, scores are tallied:

• 1VP per Controlled Province on the board (+3VP for player with most/tied for most)
• 1VP per Knowledge Card owned (+3VP for player with most/tied for most)
• 2VP per Completed Wonder (+3VP for player with most/tied for most)
• 2VP per Policy Card developed (+3VP for player with most/tied for most)

The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most Gold left over.

My thoughts on the game

Monumental is a game that has been on my radar for awhile now, having seen it advertised at Spiel fairs since before the pandemic…  I remembered it going to Kickstarter in some ginormous package with custom minis and all sorts of embellishments that aren’t normally my thing, so I filed it away as something that looked gorgeous but not something I was going to consider backing.  I admit that I had kind of forgotten about it, and then it pops up in the retail stream this fall!   As I consider this to be a deck-builder (of sorts), I was naturally interested in it, and the retail version seems to be more my style with cards and cardboard bits, all fitting in a reasonable sized box!

In those three years, the game has been refined a bit, namely with the Continuous Play mode in response to downtime issues.  Again, I have only ever played with the Continuous Play mode, and admittedly, the game is still pretty long even with these improved rules; but it feels like I’m more engaged in every phase of the game without much time to wait around.  Sure, if we’re playing with a particularly slow or AP-prone player, you might have to still wait for them to finish their phase; but I’m only waiting for one of those phases, not FOUR of them between my plays.  One BGG review mentioned this about the regular rules: “. At 3 players your down time between your turns may get to 10 or 20 minutes near the end of the game which is tolerable, but if you are playing a 4 or even 5 player game you are looking at close to an 1/2 hour to 45 minutes til it is your turn again.“  And, yeah, I’ll admit that this would have been a hard stop – maybe even at 3 players…  So, I’ll not be able to comment on just how much better the new rules are, but I realistically can’t ever see myself playing a version of this game that is longer on the clock than the Continuous mode.

It has been pointed out to me by multiple people that the game tactics are very possibly different in the Continuous play mode (because the timing of  your actions gets interrupted by other players in this version) – but as it is the only frame of reference I have for the game, it worked just fine.  

I personally love the strategy around managing the actions in your card array.   There is a bit of deckbuilding going on, and I’ve always been partial to that.  Also, trying to pick which row and column to use now (and considering what will be left behind to work with for next round) is generally an interesting decision process.

Early in the game, there is a lot of production and card churning to get more cards as well as short forays to move your units about to pick up nearby bonuses.  As you get more powerful cards (which generate more resources), the map part of the game gets more interesting as you have a greater ability to move around and conquer things.  I like the way that units are not removed from the board but rather returned to the home province – but I think this is because i’m not really a wargamer at heart.  I generally don’t like fighting in games, and here, it feels more just like moving bits around for area control as they ebb and flow on the map.

The board can get pretty busy, and the disks in my basic version take up a good portion of each land area.  I have seen pictures of the deluxe version, and man, there are SO MANY minis that need to fit on the board, and it makes me glad I just have a stack of cardboard discs on mine.  Of course, to each their own, as I know plenty of friends who have salivated over the full version with minis for years now. 

In the end though, this game is about the optimization of my card array.  That’s the part of the game that really intrigues me, and the part that makes me want to play it again.  Early in the game, decisions are very straightforward, but later on, you will likely have a number of different possible choices of which lines to choose, and each will take you down a different tactical arc.  And, in some cases, based on the map state or the cards in the market, you might prefer to leave certain cards on the table this turn so that they are available for you in the next round when hopefully things are more to your liking (i.e. don’t use all your science production now if there isn’t a knowledge card that you want…)

The actual VP count isn’t too high in the game, most things only grant 1 or 2 VPs, so you’ll have to figure out how to do a little bit of everything.  At the same time, the large bonus for having the most of a scoring criteria will push you the other way into specializing.  This is a good push and pull here, and it definitely makes you rethink your strategy often as you try to maximize your point total.  Some have complained of a rich-getting-richer thing here, but I don’t see it that way since each scoring criteria has its own bonus and concentrating in one area makes it harder to succeed in others.  The trick is to figure out how to compete for multiple bonuses, or at least get more bonuses than your opponents; those extra 3VP can play a huge role in the final score.

I’m intrigued enough now to want to play it again, but the game length is going to be an ongoing obstacle for me.  While I love the deckbuilding and the puzzle of playing the cards, the length of the game is a bit long for what you get in the 2p game, and really long for what you get at higher player counts.  It remains to be seen whether continued experience makes the game length shorter or not – that will ultimately determine whether the game stays in the collection or not.

Amazon affiliate link – https://amzn.to/3u1jkoF

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson: (1 play with two players, 4 plays solo) Here’s what I wrote originally in responding to my first couple of plays of the game: “Monumental mixes deck building, tableau manipulation, board play, and combat – and, to my surprise, actually has a really solid solo mode that is easy to execute and leaves the focus of the game on what your civilization is doing rather than running the automata.  However, it’s a pretty substantial set-up time (30 minutes or so, particularly if you’re using some of the expansion content or extra modules)… so you need to be someone (like me!) who enjoys the process of getting the game ready to go.”

I have some more thoughts now with five games under my belt:

• The solo mode really is very good – and highly customizable as you add in the expansions. (Each civilization has its own AI card in the deck… and each warlord has a characteristic – technological, aggressive, architectural, cultural, or economic that trigger some of the AI cards.)
• The expansions add some nice twists – new civilizations and new terrain hexes with special rules – as well as additional cards/tokens for the Hero/Monster modules. The African Empires has the most new stuff in the box – including the Trade system, the Future Era, Unrest cards, The Reserve, and the Natural Wonders & Quest Modules.
• Speaking of the various modules, I have some feelings:
  • Renaissance Era: adds extra time to the game without adding much to the game… only for diehards
  • Monster module: a bit fiddly to set up, but nice way to keep the game from feeling same-y (and also gives you more to do with your explorers)
  • Heroes module: need to try this one again – the heroes in my single game didn’t make much of a difference, but that might be a different story with a larger player count
  • Future Era: a pretty simple system to convert leftover basic resources into points in the final turns of the game – recommended
  • Unrest cards: with great power comes great hassles… cards that clog up your deck & display – necessary to use with a number of the African Empire cards
  • The Reserve: some tokens and civilizations can reserve cards that weren’t in the original development deck… allowing for some interesting tactics
  • Natural Wonders module: essentially pre-placed Wonder(s) that offers extra goodies to whoever controls it/them… another way to vary up board design
  • Quest module: each player has two quests which are worth points (2 each) if they fulfill by the end of the game… helps set some directions in how you are going to play/make decisions
  • Trade system: not only gives your explorers more to do (create trading posts) but also gives you another way to score points and get resources… I like it a lot
• You really need to either (a) have friends who like helping set up the game, or (b) enjoy the zen-like experience of setting up a large game over 30+ minutes. (I fit squarely in the (b) category.) Probably the biggest strike against playing it solo is set-up time.
• I think the miniatures would look really cool – but the board is busy enough without minis and would be really hard to read with the addition of them.
• Overall, I’m glad I have this… but I think my primary plays will be a max of three players, with solo and two player more likely.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y (2p), Mark J.
• Neutral. Dale Y (3-4p), Steph H
• Not for me…