Monasterium

Thankfully, I have played better games—but Monasterium is certainly not the disappointment I feared it would be. It had been sitting in my collection for a while, and I hesitated to bring it to the table because the rules had looked heavy to me. In the end, I was wrong: the explanation takes a little time, but the rules are approachable and, once the game begins, its logic becomes clear very quickly.

At its core, it is an interesting tableau builder. I choose dice from a shared dice pool and use them for basic actions: either gathering goods or placing monks in various parts of the monastery. The shared pool means players’ choices meet one another, without the game needing to become aggressive or overloaded.

Placing monks is not simply another source of those familiar victory points. It unlocks better actions for the corresponding die, so the game quickly takes on the logic of an engine built around achieving end-game goals. That connection between tableau development and upgraded options is what makes it flow much more elegantly than the initial explanation suggests.

It does not have the action or the killer combos of Grand Austria Hotel, but in return it carries almost none of the headache. Its length is just right, while the scoring seemed, even on a first play, balanced and open enough to support multiple strategies. I will definitely come back to it—and I recommend it without reservation.