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| By Thunderworks Games |
All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go
Roll Player was THE sleeper hit of 2016. Everywhere I went, online and in person, everyone was singing the praises of this meta-game, where the point was to build the best possible character. Honestly, I thought this was a STUPID theme. Sure, you're drafting dice, trying to min-max your way into the perfect character, buying the best and most thematic equipment along the way, but what's the point, right? Making a character and not USING that character to go on an adventure, it's kind of a tease.
And then I played it. And while the game was good (VERY good), I still ended the game feeling like Ross in the episode of Friends where he gets ready to take Rachel to prom at the last minute.
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| Yeah, you all know EXACTLY which episode I'm talking about... |
But then they announced Monsters & Minions, an expansion to Roll Player that lets the player USE the character they've been building the entire game to go on adventures and fight bad guys... But with a game design as well crafted as the base game, would adding said Monsters & Minions make the game unnecessarily long or complicated?
Monster Hunting For Dummies
The Monsters & Minions is played more or less the same as you would the base game, you still take turns drawing and rolling dice, drafting said dice into an attribute on your race sheet, before buying equipment and skills from the Market, while trying to match the character goals for your stats and dice colors based on your Alignment, Backstory,and Class.
The major difference is that in the beginning of the game a Monster is revealed, playing the role of the big bad beastie that's terrorizing the helpless village. Over the course of the game, players have the option to go Hunting instead of taking a trip to the Market. While On a Hunt, they roll Combat Dice and add modifiers based on the Minion they're going up against, and are rewarded with XP, Valor, and even Wounds if you don't roll well enough. But the most important thing you might get is information.
You see if you roll well enough to actually KILL a minion, you get to look at one of the Monster's secret cards: its Location, an Obstacle in the way, or the Monster's Attack. These are all bonuses or penalties that occur when you fight the Monster and are based on how you built your character. For example, one attack may say that players add 1 to their Combat roll for every Blue Die they have, or maybe they subtract 1 for every Die in your Intelligence Attribute.
Knowing this lets you build the perfect Monster slayer, because at the end of the game, EVERY player has to face the Monster, and if you do well enough in that fight, you can earn up to 8(!) points! There is nothing else in the ENTIRE GAME (as far as I know) that is worth that many points!
But what I love is that it's not a game breaking amount. If you focus your entire game on slaying the Monster, ignoring the Class rewards, or the Backstory, you will lose. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. The Monster does not take over the game, it simply adds an additional way to win, which is how an expansion should be!
The major difference is that in the beginning of the game a Monster is revealed, playing the role of the big bad beastie that's terrorizing the helpless village. Over the course of the game, players have the option to go Hunting instead of taking a trip to the Market. While On a Hunt, they roll Combat Dice and add modifiers based on the Minion they're going up against, and are rewarded with XP, Valor, and even Wounds if you don't roll well enough. But the most important thing you might get is information.
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| The other half being red and blue lasers... |
You see if you roll well enough to actually KILL a minion, you get to look at one of the Monster's secret cards: its Location, an Obstacle in the way, or the Monster's Attack. These are all bonuses or penalties that occur when you fight the Monster and are based on how you built your character. For example, one attack may say that players add 1 to their Combat roll for every Blue Die they have, or maybe they subtract 1 for every Die in your Intelligence Attribute.
Knowing this lets you build the perfect Monster slayer, because at the end of the game, EVERY player has to face the Monster, and if you do well enough in that fight, you can earn up to 8(!) points! There is nothing else in the ENTIRE GAME (as far as I know) that is worth that many points!
But what I love is that it's not a game breaking amount. If you focus your entire game on slaying the Monster, ignoring the Class rewards, or the Backstory, you will lose. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. The Monster does not take over the game, it simply adds an additional way to win, which is how an expansion should be!
The Dice Life
You get more Races, more Backstories, and more of just about everything, including enough dice to add in a 5th player. The Combat Dice themselves are high quality and slightly smaller than the Attribute Dice, so there's very little chance that you'll mix them up. But they add in 2 new components, completely unrelated to Monster Slaying that I would have paid for on their own: Scrolls and BOOST DICE!
Scrolls are single use items you can buy from the Market yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, but BOOST DICE. Boost Dice are translucent dice that go from 3 to 8!
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| Not quite 11... |
They're a trade off, though, because they're clear, so that means they don't count as any particular color for scoring. It's a great way to prevent them from being the dice that all the players go for.
Buy It!, Try It, or Fly It!
Rating system recap:
Buy It! = Go buy this, right now! It is fantastic and worth your hard earned money!
Try It! = Play it with a friend or at your local game store. You might like it or you might not.
Fly It! = %&#! this game!
Monsters & Minions is the pinnacle of what a game expansion should be. It adds to the game without completely changing the rules (Catan, I'm looking at you). The Monster, the Minions, these are new options. They're not REQUIREMENTS. They give the players more things to do on their turn, and more ways to WIN! That's the point of expansions! Give the players new and exciting things to do, but without rewriting what players love about the game!
Add into this more classes, more races, more players, more, more, more... Minions & Monsters does everything right. Now, I'm off to take my Mechanical Construct Druid named Rusty Tinman to fight the Kraken...
Buy It! = Go buy this, right now! It is fantastic and worth your hard earned money!
Try It! = Play it with a friend or at your local game store. You might like it or you might not.
Fly It! = %&#! this game!
Monsters & Minions is the pinnacle of what a game expansion should be. It adds to the game without completely changing the rules (Catan, I'm looking at you). The Monster, the Minions, these are new options. They're not REQUIREMENTS. They give the players more things to do on their turn, and more ways to WIN! That's the point of expansions! Give the players new and exciting things to do, but without rewriting what players love about the game!
Add into this more classes, more races, more players, more, more, more... Minions & Monsters does everything right. Now, I'm off to take my Mechanical Construct Druid named Rusty Tinman to fight the Kraken...
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