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Review. Monasterium
Dice
in the Monastery
At least since “The Name of the Rose“ I have had a weakness for monastery themes. And if the text on a game box, like
the one of Monasterium, even promises “an innovative dice mechanism,“ I‘m hooked. However, I wouldn‘t have expected such a heavyweight: Monasterium is a game for experts. Let‘s contemplate this.
By STEFAN DUCKSCH
The gameboard shows five monas­ teries, each consisting of several buildings, a chapel, and a cloister. This is where you send one of your nu­ merous novices from your personal board. The more novices that you provide with a job in the monasteries, the more substan­ tial your options will be later on. There­ fore, you collect Influence tiles, Rosary tiles or Soup tiles – all these are entry tickets to monastic life. Additionally, you move your messenger along the central road on the main board. To begin with, your novices can enter a monastery only if your messenger is standing on a road space connected to that monastery.
If you think you have an unlimited amount of time – after all, you are in the tranquil Middle Ages – you‘ll be surprised. The game is played over the course of three cycles, called “monastery years,“ during which everybody is the starting player once. This might lead to agonized perspiration, at least from year two on, since there is still so much to do. For beginners, year one seems to just zip by. There are so many options – but what is connected to what and how? The in­
structions are detailed, but not helpful for finding a structure for your own way of playing. In most cases, you begin to understand only after the final scoring.
Initially, a die number is assigned to exactly one (standard) action: taking a resource, moving your messenger or sending out one of your novices. But if you choose the number of a column in the Action area from which you already sent a novice, you activate the corre­ sponding action, too. Sending out novic­ es from the top row in the Action area is relatively inexpensive, but varies your options only to a moderate degree. In row two, you can gain considerable improve­ ments: your messenger moves faster, and you get more resources. Very strong – and therefore a must – is the slot that enables you to send out novices at the cost of one less Influence tile than usual. The more of your personnel that is on the board, the more expensive is the placement.
Row three always shows the same op­ tion: sending a novice to the chapel of a monastery. This gives you two benefits at once: first the novice will open the door to the monastery to other novices of the same color, even if your messenger is not nearby; and second with the applicable
die, you can make use of the activated space on your board to build a Church Window tile from the monastery into your own cathedral. This gives you immediate bonuses and, later on, a good deal of vic­ tory points. That‘s something everybody will go for, just as getting one‘s own mes­ senger to the last space of the road, since this gives the player an additional die in his color. Despite all the variability, quite a few procedures in Monasterium seem to be indispensable for success.
Since each row and column in your ca­ thedral may only contain different Church Window tiles, this is an element that you can use very well to knock other players‘ lights out. There is a lot of interaction, you just need to look very carefully. The same applies to the placement of the novices in the colored monastery buildings, where they are trained as cooks, craftsmen or scholars. Their position determines where you will be allowed to place additional novices in the cloister later on.
At the end of the game, you multiply the number of your novices in the clois­ ter by the number of your novices in the chapel. Plus, you score points for having majorities in monasteries and being rep­ resented in as many chapels as possible.
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Photos: Becker, Ducksch