Monasterium

In Monasterium players are deans of cathedrals in the middle ages, hoping to train their ecclesiastical novices the best, to score the most points. It’s not an easy game to explain – in fact, we’d say it takes a few plays to really get your head around the various options and strategies – and it definitely feels more mechanical than story-driven. But it’s nonetheless an intriguing thing…

The board shows five monasteries, and running between them a path along which you will move your Messernger; whom we will return to shortly. Each player has their own player boards consisting of an Action board (full of novices – see pictures!) and a church window, at this point unglazed and presumably letting in a sinful breeze.

At the start of each round, dice are rolled – by all players – and placed on the board ready to be claimed. On your turn, you can take up to three matching-numbered dice and activate the matching-numbered actions on your player board. For instance: I grab two ‘4’s and activate the ‘4’ slot on my player board, taking two influence tokens. Then it’s someone else’s turn.

Why do I need influence tokens – or for that matter, the other resources of soup, tools, books, rosaries? Because the (-important!) action in the ‘1’ slot allows me to pay resources to send my novices off to improve themselves in the monasteries. This has a double-barrelled effect: firstly, novices in monasteries will score points at the end of the game, so getting them out of the domestic house and into the houses of the lord is, long term, what you want.

Secondly though, the vacated novice opens up a space on your player board, which is a new available action when you take that numbered die in future! As these actions tend to be more rewarding than your basic ‘starter set’ actions it pays to open these up as soon as you can, so your future turns will be more productive.

However.

Getting novices out the door isn’t always so straightforward. Partly because of how much it costs you to pay for them and partly because there is a hierarchy at the monasteries of where novices are allowed to go: for instance, they’re not allowed in the cloisters until they already have a presence in the buildings. And you can only send a novice to a monastery either if you have one their already or your Messenger is present: and this is why your messenger is important, as moving them along the path gives access to new monasteries. Some of the path spaces also triggers bonus actions as well, such as getting a pan of glass for your window!

It’s possible to play the entire game neglecting the window and still being, possibly, successful. But filling the window with panes of glass gets you rewards whenever you complete a row or column – bearing in mind that rows and columns can’t have the same colour in them twice. How do you get these panes? Usually through the placing of novices. Get placing!

Each ‘year’ of the game gives all players one turn as starting player, and after three years the game ends. Points are scored for majorities in the monasteries, the number of chapels your novices are in, any remaining resources you have and finally the Cloisters score, somewhat convolutedly, for number of novices in the cloisters multiplied by novices in the chapel and the resulting number being doubled. Whew!