Encyclopedia of Monsters Review: Haunted Britannica
Transcript
Hey folks, I'm Tom Bassel and today we are taking a look at a game that looks like a series of games called Encyclopedia of Monsters. Well, I think it's mostly here made to look like a set of encyclopedias back in the day when that salesman would come to your door and give you volume J for free, but you had to buy the rest of them. Here we have an encyclopedia of monsters. And this sounds like a big grandiose game here. Um, but it does say it's 15 minutes long, six and older to play it from Scorpion Mask. And Scorpion Mask is usually on fire with the stuff that they come out. Their games are small, but they do very well. And so this one is a little bigger than normal for them, but it looks like five different games are included here. That's not quite the case. It's the same game five times. Let me show you a little more and we'll come back.
When you play this, you're going to take the boxes out. You'll play them in order. You go with Europe. You open a box and pull out the different things, which are going to be some tokens. The you'll have the rule book for the whole game. And then each of these continents, Europe has three countries. You'll have Scotland, Sweden, and Romania. When you're done with that, you can go to the next one. Each of them shows you how the rules for that country are. So, this one tells us we need to use these tokens for this country. This is the first country, Scotland. Gives you some theming here. It tells you about one of the monsters. So, we have two skeletons, two ghosts, two banshees, and two trolls. Those tokens are placed out here as well as the candles. The cards that match those are dealt evenly to all the players. Now, players may not communicate with each other. You can talk, but you can't communicate about the cards in your hand other than what the rules of the game allow. So, on your turn, what you're going to do is you're going to play a card. So, here this is the ghost card.
And it says be this one tells us here that before searching for the ghost, I reveal a monster token of my choice. So, I'm like, "All right, everyone. We all look at this one. That's the banshee. Now I have to turn over a token that matches this. I failed. So this card goes back in my hand and then all the tokens are turned face down. Then the next person goes and maybe they play a troll where they show everyone but themselves a token. Then they're going to turn over a token. So maybe they turn over this one. Nope, it doesn't match. Each time you fail, you snuff out a candle. Now, eventually someone's going to maybe play a ghost and they're going to flip over the correct token. That's great. That card stays in the table. Then someone else plays a troll and they flip over the correct token. You need to play all the cards in a row, flipping over the correct tokens using these before the candles go out and then you win. If that's the case, you then go to the next country. So, the next country here adds a dog and so now this dog is going to help you. Then the next one adds a vampire and a vampire card with some new rules. And then when you go to another country, let's say when you're done with this, you go to the Americas, you will have everything is kind of restarts. You'll have some of the same creatures. You'll notice that there's ghosts and skeletons and trolls here, but now there's the Kurapy and the Rugaroos with all the different tokens and cards that match them. And
that's how you play the game. You're just going to play through these one at a time. I guess you can play them in any order you want, but they're certainly made to be played through in a specific order. So, this game is memory match with powers done five times. So, I want to talk the production is is good. Scorpion has they have good artwork. I love how everything looks. The rules are very easy to understand and explain. You remember what all the monsters do very quickly. I do not love this packaging as this though because when you get to the Americas, you have three of the same monsters again, and it feels like wasted components.
Sure, they did that so that you had a fresh batch of new cards, I guess, and that the card backs matched them, but it just feels kind of a waste. This whole game I think could be stored in one of these boxes. There's that few components to to I mean it could it might be a really smash fit in there, but it just feels kind of a waste. It's this whole thing is like ooh I'm going to pull off Africa and go through the special abilities in there. Okay, but why did I need this big thing other than I want that physical idea of pulling it off? And not only that, the game doesn't change dramatically. Yes, the special abilities change, don't get me wrong. Each one you're like, "Okay, now this monster lets us do this." And it gets it definitely gets harder as you go through, but it's going to be the same thing. We're doing memory match as a group cooperative memory match. I'm turning over this token. You know, I should turn over that token, but you must keep a straight face because you cannot communicate with me. Although you might be able to put a card that lets you reveal that token to me because you already know what it is or I've forgotten. So, as a group, we're trying to remember. And it's kind of a weird memory match game in a sense that we Oh, yes. Correct. Correct. Correct. Whoops.
This one's wrong. Turn them all back over. Put everything back in our hands. Now, we all need to remember where everything was because we're shuffling those cards up and doing it again, but this time I have this card. But I know where that is. And it's an interesting exercise. I don't even dislike it, but I don't want to play it 15 different ways. The game isn't that interesting that I want to say, "Oh, what's the new monster? Oh, what's the new monster? What's the new monster?" I'm still playing Memory 15 times later. Again, that doesn't make me dislike it. This this is getting a 6 out of 10 for me because I I feel like when I played with my kids, my kids we the first time we played, we thought it was interesting and amusing and we're working together in our minds with that lack of communication, which is so loved by the general public these days. I'm not as big of a fan of this lack of communication stuff, but it's there. But then we played the second one and it added one dog. We're like, "Oh, okay."
Then we played the third one. It added vampire. That was a little more interesting. Then we went to the second one. We're like, "Oo, it's a whole new box." No, it's the same monsters, but there's one new monster. Oh, okay. And after a while, my kids said, "Are we doing the same thing again?" And I agreed with them. It did feel like the same thing over and over and over again. And I don't know that that justifies me taking up this space of my shelf. It looks cool and it sounds cool. Encyclopedia monsters. And for a good sense, it does teach you a little bit about these monster legends and the things. And I I like reading about that in here. That's all cool. It's just that I don't know that I want to keep doing that same thing over and over again. So, it's fine. If you do like memory games or you want sort of an adventure with your children with that memory limited communication, I think you'll really like it. But for me, 6 out of 10. It's an interesting idea. You might pull one of these off and pick a scenario in there, get the right pieces, and play it. And I would have like, oh yeah, that's not a bad little game. I just don't want to do it this much. So, that's Encyclopedia of Monsters from Scorpion Mask. I'm Tom Vassel. We'll see you next time.
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