Lindisfarne Monastery is a competitive euro-style dice worker placement game about monks working at a Christian monastery in the early Medieval period. Inspired by the real monastery of Lindisfarne, players work to create resources, feed themselves, and write religious texts for the library, culminating in the great Lindisfarne Gospels.
The monks are represented by dice, and the pips on the dice represent their level of experience. As the monks are placed on action spaces each round, their pips are converted to action points to spend in that action space. Each round, the player who has pip majority in each action space may claim an available bonus, which may include the ability to pip up a die.
Monks can also be sent in pilgrimage to holy sites overseas, and to collect rare, vivid inks to take home for use in their scriptorium. The monks must also beware the Vikings, who raid the monastery every summer, and who must be paid off in beer and mead, lest they steal the treasures of the monastery or murder the monks!
A full game of Lindisfarne Monastery is played over four game rounds, representing calendar years, where in each year there are two action phases, and within each action phase the monk dice are placed, and then resolved. Points are scored from pilgrimage, from writing religious texts, commissioning treasures for the monastery chapel, and for retiring monk dice from the board. The player with the highest total score at the end of the game is declared the winner.
—description from the designer