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!).

Continue reading →

Moon River

• Designers: Bruno Cathala, Yohan Servais
• Publisher: blue orange
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher
• Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/48YC5rF

The subtitle on the box is: “Piece together the next level of Kingdomino”.  The publisher’s blurb: Moon River uses the Kingdomino game system — but without dominoes. In the game, you will build a personal landscape of tiles to score points, but instead of tiling dominoes in your landscape, the game uses half-dominoes in which one edge has a jigsaw puzzle-style connection. You combine two of these half puzzle pieces to craft your own dominoes. This mechanism is meant to provide more variability and randomization in each play. Instead of building your landscape around a central castle, you start from the river and expand away from it. Also, the crowns (i.e., the victory point multiplier) from Kingdomino are replaced by cow meeples, with players being able to use cowboys to move them.

Continue reading →