The Monolith Review - Control the Monolith, Control the World!
Transcript
Hey, I'm Alex Radcliffe from BoardGameCo. Today, we're reviewing The Monolith from Plaid Hat Games. The Monolith is a three-to-four player area control game that plays out across four days in which players are trying to, well, do area control thingies. There's There's more to it. There's points you get. We'll get into all of that soon. But, you try to do all the area control things across four rounds trying to be the player who has the most points at the end of it. This is a prototype. All rules, components subject to change. And I'll have a link to the crowdfunding campaign down below. Also, two notes. One, All Play is a channel sponsor. More about them at the end of the video. And number two, while this review is not sponsored, they did have us do a sponsored gameplay. This review is me talking about how I feel about the game. But, obviously, that introduces bias. Please take that into account while you watch this video. With that said, we're going to go ahead and remove the Monolith. We'll come back to it. We're going to remove the Monolith out of the way so you can see everything on the board. But, basically, this is an area control game. The game is broken up into three phases. There's the order phase, the action phase, and then the rest phase. The order phase is primarily where players are going to be setting up for the future rounds where you go ahead and start killing each other. The reason you're going to want to kill each other is mostly basically going to come down to area control plus the various points you're going to get for actually taking each other out. But, in the order phase, you're going to have a variety of actions. You can move your shaman across the board. Shamans are not linked to a faction. You're going to have a faction, clip your base on it. You're going to choose your shaman and their ability.
And you can move them around the board in order to collect dead bodies or to situate yourself up for the following round. Collecting dead bodies is important in most games you play with a dudes. You kill them, they die. In this game, they fall on the board and you have to pick them up and collect them where they go to your anger pool where they can then be traded in for a variety of effects. So, that's an important aspect of the game. You can also pay to move your units around the board. pay to move your units, position them. Again, this is the phase where it's going to be more economical to do so. If you wait till the action phase, it costs more resources to go ahead and move your units. You're going to be paying your hearts over here. You're going to start the game with hearts. You're going to be getting more as the game goes on. You're going to be spending your hearts to go ahead and move your shaman around the board. You're going to be spending your hearts to go go and move your units around the board. You're going to be spending your hearts to go ahead and get your hands on these divination cards, basically bidding to go ahead and acquire a card. When you bid to acquire a card, you're going to have somebody else on their turn, they can outbid you.
If they do, when it comes back to you, you have the opportunity of upping your bid for free. By free, I just mean it doesn't take an action. You still have to pay to go ahead and up your bid. Alternatively, if when it comes back to your turn, you are the high bidder, then you're going to get that card. And so, players are playing constant dance of trying to see which cards are too powerful to allow others to get. Alternatively, how many hearts do you have left to spend, and can you afford to actually stop Sarah from getting that card that's going to help her win the game. These are some of the choices you're going to have to be making as you play through this. When you're done with the whole order phase, eventually you're going to get to a point where you're going to go ahead and grab the monolith, you're going to grab your remaining hearts, and you're going to commit them. The action is called commit. You're going to take your hearts, and you're going to dump them into the power. That's going to have them going through this network of weave kind of. It's going to slowly, layer by layer, you can see this weave over here. But, basically, they're going to eventually be dumping down onto this board over here, which I will put onto the table so you can see it in action. Actually, you know what? I'll actually have all the other players dump their remaining hearts in first, so you can see that.
But, basically, the last action you're going to do in the order phase is committing, where you're basically saying, "Okay, great. My remaining hearts are going towards the next round." Let me put that down over there. My remaining hearts are going Do I have the wrong side? I think I have the wrong side. No, I think I have the right side. Let me put this back. Why? There we go. You're going to go ahead and put your remaining hearts into the tableau. So, let's go ahead and do that. I have a bunch of hearts from the variety of players. I'll sprinkle down there, where we can then proceed to the action phase so you can see how that would play out. We're not spending all of them because we assume the players have spent a bunch of these on a variety of actions instead. So, you dump the variety of hearts down over here. Keeping in mind, by the way, that the player who first commits, the first player who commits is going to get this surge card. This surge card is going to give you extra actions in this phase. Once all players have done this, they've all committed, last player is done, you're going to go ahead and remove this and see how everything fell out into the variety of actions. Because you have slay, boast, and maneuver as the three actions you can take. Slay, as you might imagine, is going to involve killing other units. Boast is effectively saying, "I'm really strong in this area and I think you won't be able to stop me." And so, you're going to place a heart down in his own. You'll get extra points if you control it, but alternatively, other players are incentivized to make sure that you don't control it. And then, maneuver is going to be moving around the board, but not with the same degree of flexibility you had in the order action, like I said in the in the order phase. Like I said already, it is cheaper to move in the order phase, but sometimes you need to go ahead and adapt to whatever the situation is in the action phase. So, now what happens is, instead of taking one turn at a time spending hearts, players are going to take multiple turns, two turns at a time, spending their hearts for these three actions, but whoever committed first gets four
actions on the first turn, and they can start doing all the various powerful things. So, you can go ahead and say, "Oh, I'm going to go ahead and move one red heart, and I'm going to move, uh, you know, one of my units to an adjacent zone." Usually, when you move in the in the order phase, you can move a grouping of units as many hearts as you spend, giving you a lot of flexibility. In the action phase, you can spend one heart for one unit to move once, which is much more limiting. But now, we can spend another heart from the slay action over here to go ahead and uh kill this unit, gaining one honor on the honor track, and then we can spend another heart going ahead and boasting in this zone, which is basically saying, "Hey, we think we're the one who's going to win it." Which, honestly, is a little bit uh a little bit bagocious of them, considering they only have one unit there. Which is why they'll spend the last heart over here to go ahead and move another unit to that zone. That could be a hypothetical situation of spending your four actions. Players are going to do this uh taking two actions at a time after the first player, tracking and alternating between slaying, boasting, and maneuvering as you try to set yourself up to get as many points as possible. The points in this game are primarily going to come through a few different areas. You're going to get a point every time you kill a person. You're going to get a three points every time honor. You're going to get three honor every time you kill an enemy shaman. You're going to get honor every time you control a temple or favor. Not honor, favor. You get points when you control uh uh temples over here. There's going to be four temples on the board or three temples in a three-player game, but every every one of those is worth two favor that you're going to get as you go. And you also get points for various objectives. You'll start the game with some objectives, have opportunities to earn others by controlling scriptoriums over here, and you can cash those in when you've met them in order to get more favor there.
So, basically, favor for killing stuff, favor for controlling things, and favor from objectives. There's also going to be an event deck. In the cleanup phase of each round, when you get to the end of the day, you're going to go a whole uh recycle phase, a resting phase. I'm not going through all the technical details. You can watch our gameplay if you want to see it in action, but you will get events with the player who has the least favor gets to choose how an event resolves. There's some degree of choice or agency over these. Alternatively, sometimes it's just straight up benefits them, but that event's going to resolve with, again, that player having a little bit more control over it before you go into the next day. Gathering a few more hearts in the supply, every player is going to add two hearts to their pool from the supplies over here, and then you're going to go into the next day with more fervor, the hearts over here, in order to control your actions more. That's basically what is happening in the monolith. There's a lot more small details to get into. We haven't gone into some of the way these cards play out. These cards are top-notch, but again, you can check out our gameplay if you want to see more of that, or you can just go ahead and watch me talk about what I think about this game, what I like, don't like, and what Cecilia's not liking, starting off with what I like.
To begin with, this is possibly one of the easiest area control games I have ever learned, taught, and played relative to the amount you get out of it. I'll start with that. The The rulebook is a handful of pages of the actual core structure of what you're doing, and then a few more other pages of, like, you know, card clarity and whatnot, but it's almost certainly the best ratio of simplicity to how good the game is in terms of games like this. A very often area control games have a ton of rules, a tons of nuances, tons of aspects to it that really make it a lot more to actually teach and get people up and running. This is one of the simplest while not being a simple game. It is strategically deep, but it's rules light, and that is a very satisfying little puzzle to have over there. The order of the action phase and the order phase and the timing of it all is a brilliantly set up structure in which you won't want to make as many choices as possible during the order phase cuz you you a lot more control over how things are set up, but the problem with that is if you spend too much of your hearts during the order phase, you won't have enough to hearts to spend to take your actions. And the actions are key.
You need to slay, boast, and maneuver in the action phase, and so that there's a constant trade-off of how much you do in the pre-phase versus how much you do once you actually go to the actions. And that trade-off is further magnified by that little aspect of the first person to commit gets four actions. Getting four actions and going first is so incredibly impactful that it almost is always in your best interest to do so. The problem is if you do so too early, other players have too much time to set up and adapt to the fact that they're like, "Oh, you're jumping to the action phase, ready to kill us? I guess we'll back away slowly over the next few actions because we don't want you to be able to just jump in straight and kill us." So, there's this constant trade-off of getting more done when you jump to the actions versus getting more done in the order phase. All of that's amazing. The shamans are incredibly strong. Each of the shamans in the game gives you a strong asymmetric ability that totally trades trades off how the game is played. And some of them might seem incredibly overpowered at first, but there's a lot of nuance and depth. Like if you watch our game well, watch our gameplay. I won't I won't spoil things for you. But if you play as you play the game, there's a lot you can do to mitigate for the different abilities that the that the shamans have, and a lot of control over the shamans. The ones that have a little bit less obvious attack factor, so to speak, often have a lot more control over how movement and structure of the board plays out, and that can also be incredibly impactful.
Like I said, in this game timing is everything and positioning is everything. Murdering is just one part of the everything you're going to deal with. The divination cards over here, these cards are amazing. Possibly one of my favorite parts of the game. If not for these cards, I don't think the game would be nearly as good as it is because it once again feeds into the constant trade-off you're playing. You have a limited number of hearts to spend. Those hearts have to go towards divination cards, they have to go towards the the orders you're placing during the order phase, and they have to go towards the actions you're taking in the action phase. One would argue that there's not enough hearts. I I would argue there's not enough hearts. You always want to do more in the game, but the game gives you a very very solid balance of how long the game is. The box says 2 hours. I don't think I've had a single game hit 2 hours yet. Generally, it's around the hour and a half, maybe closer to 2 hours, but like very I'm used to boxes that say 2 hours really meaning 2 and 1/2 to 3. Uh my first game of this was 90 minutes. Subsequent games, I guess that is player count uh dependent as well. But, a four-player game usually comes in close to the 2 hours. It is It is a uh yeah, it's a it's a lot going on for the amount you get out of it as far as the game time. But, the divination cards are incredibly incredibly overpowered in all the best ways. But, the fact that you get them through an uh auctioning system, it gives you a lot of agency. There's no aspect where it's like, "Oh, well, you just got that card unfairly." No, you had to pay for it.
You had to bid. You had to estimate. You had to make decisions around where your hearts are going. And hopefully, you made the right decision as to how useful that card is for your engine. They are incredibly powerful cards that are very, very satisfying to go through. And then, even slaying. The game has a lot of slaying and killing things, but for the most part, outside of some crazy cards that really break the game in in the best possible way, uh slaying is not too abundant. Yes, you will kill people, but it's easier to recruit people than it is to kill them. And so, slaying is often more about those extra few honor points or the positioning of taking control of an area in order to just get a little again, get a temple, get the the scriptorium, whatever it is, or get the extra recruit actions, just getting that extra positioning you need. As far as what I don't like in the game, unfortunately, the biggest thing I don't You know, let's start with the small thing. Start with the small things first, then go to the big thing. The smaller things is first of all, I'll say the events and objectives don't seem to have as much impact on the game as I would like. The events have a small impact. The objectives are like a few ways to get extra points. I I felt that both of them felt like they were very small impacts in a game that is otherwise full of such key important moments, those felt like small details.
I'd rather have them be more game-breaking or more influencing as far as how the game state is going to constantly shift. Honestly, if they did away with objectives entirely and just made the events twice as powerful as far as how they change up the game, that I would like. Like, I do like the concept of events. Some events are pretty cool and change things up. But, most of them felt on the smaller side. I want the events to totally change the the scope and scale of battle or what you're going for, not in a small way, but in a big way. Have this as an optional module if you need to. But, I want it to feel like it matters more because everything else in this game matters so much more. I'll say that the board state over here has a lot of fun little minutes and whatnot. The tunnels are easy to get lost. You can move between adjacent tunnels, but especially if you are on the board, it's easy to forget those exist. It's easy to completely mentally just lose track of them. I think they almost need their own token, something that is not black so they stand out, to remind players they can move between the tunnels on the board. I think that would be very helpful. And not nearly as big of a deal, but also a factor, is these red lines. You can't move between these red lines. These are mountain scapes. And again, I'd love to see this. I mean, I haven't checked the crowdfunding page. I don't know what they have planned, but it'd be nice if there were even like 3D mountains. You don't have to have like crazy over the top. Even a small thing for a physical representation past the red line on its own could be a nice quality of life improvement to really play to really like drill down these are the lines you can move through and these are the ones you can't. It would make that table absorbability just a little bit easier. Those are smaller issues for me. The bigger issue is the monolith itself. The monolith, while it is a fun way to drop a bunch of hearts down this, and I think they did a great job with the like the honeycomb networking system. I think they did a great job with it. The actual end result of having an entire the having such a strategic
game system in which every single action is so thought out as far as the min-maxing of it all, as far as which cards are worth what, how I'm going to play things out. The amount of times that I have rolled into the monolith and then picked it up and seen that my entire turn's plans were ruined, it is not an insignificant amount of times. And don't get me wrong, the game does build in a movement system, because yes, you're going to drop [clears throat] things down and then you have actions based on those on they're in. But you're also going to have dead bodies a lot in the game. And you can go ahead and trade those dead bodies in for anger to move things around from one zone to another to give you the actions you need instead of the actions you have. And that's a very good system. The problem is I have found that every single game I've played there's been at least one turn where it wasn't about small movement between one zone. Like, oh, I need one extra slay. I need one extra boast. No, it's like my entire structure depended on having at least two slay and I got everything in boast and maneuver and those literally didn't help me at all. Even honestly a small difference is one of those things that's a very small difference. Even the minor difference that you could spend one of your units to go ahead and move your thing either direction, cuz right now you have to move it left or right clockwise in the game, even moving it either direction would have had a huge impact. If you get a ton of boast when you needed a ton of slay, that's two people for every one of those you want to convert over cuz you have to move it clockwise around the grid. And I think that is again, I think they did a good job with the mitigation, but for a game that is otherwise so tactically planned out, I often felt that the that my game really did come down to whether the monolith favored me this turn or whether it really just screwed up my plans entirely. And again, if somebody else gets what they were hoping for or even close to it, and someone else gets nothing close to what they're hoping
for, that is a huge shift in your ability to actually execute on everything you planned for in a game that is only four rounds, a single round mess up can be make or break for you. As far as I can see other than liking the game, uh feeling characters are overpowered is definitely a concern. Again, I think uh again, if you watch the game play and not get into it too much, there's a character who is uh much more guns blazing, and they can definitely seem overpowered at first. And in fact, other characters as well. There's a character again, watch the game play, watch things out, but there's different characters, they all give you a degree of um there there's the characters break the game in different ways, and it's easy, especially if you're losing games, it's easy to look at a character that's breaking the game and be like, "Your character is broken." Uh for me, I'm not quite confident of that yet. I'm not confident it's balanced either, but I can say over multiple plays, it feels like you have a lot more control over how it's going to play out. So, uh just a it's definitely something that could be a factor for you. And then also, the monolith physically. Meaning, I have an issue with the monolith as a game component in general, but physically on the board, putting it off to the side feels like it's not good. It feels like you kind of want the monolith on the board. The downside of it being on the board is it's on the board. It's a giant thing that blocks line of sight.
You have players around the table, you don't know what's around the monolith. So, it feels like that from a game perspective, the best thing to do is to not have it on the board. But that doesn't feel like what the game is designed to do. So, uh do what you will with that. Sit on all one side of the table if you can, I guess. If you can't, then um you might not see things as well. It just is what it is. As far as final thoughts on the Monolith, uh overall, I've really enjoyed the Monolith. I think they did an excellent job in so, so, so many aspects. From the ease of the ease of learning the game, the tension on the decisions, the reasonable game time, uh the components, the quality of the miniatures, the the Monolith itself, everything is like incredibly top-notch in so many different factors. This is an excellent area control game. For me, it's held back by one thing, and it is a thing that unfortunately does strongly impact exactly where it is for me. For me, I'm still going to come in at a four out of five. I still think this is a phenomenal game. But, that one aspect of holding back, of having the Monolith be a such a huge uh element of how things are going to play out when I otherwise feel like I'm planning the game, and then the Monolith, you know, slaps me in the face, that is something that definitely holds it back for me. It's still fun. It's just that it goes into I go into it knowing that hopefully the gods favor me, uh otherwise I might just not get what I want. So, a four out of five. As far as other game recommendations, definitely check out Blood Rage for a classic three-round game of smashing each other to the ground as you take control of various areas and attempt to hurt people while also sometimes attempting to die.
Sometimes you want to do that in that game. And then also check out DEI, Divide et Impera, one of my favorite area control games that favors a lot more area control over fighting, but there's just enough dead bodies along the way to remind people that the frozen wastelands do matter to someone. I mentioned at the beginning that All Play is a channel sponsor. If you go to allplay.com, you can find a variety of games from a variety of other publishers, including All Play themselves, and you can get everything in the US for $4 flat rate shipping. you know, combine whatever you want. And check out Wonderland's War from Grey Fox Games if you're looking for another epic three-round game of bag building and area control set in the world of Wonderland. In any case, until next time, I'm Alex Radcliffe from BoardGameCo. I hope you found this video helpful, and as always, I hope you have a good one.