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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Ragnar Brothers | Monastery

Monastery

Price: £24.99

Board Game; 2-4 Players; Ages 14+ by Ragnar Brothers Monastery is a tile laying game in which players construct different parts of a medieval monastery. The work is done by the monks of a player. The monks may move from tile to tile and in addition to building work they can also study, toil or pray. In the ‘icon’ game monks can also make use of the special properties of some of the tiles. The tiles vary in value ranging from 1 point field and path tiles to 5 point Chapter House and Library. The higher the value of tile the more monks are needed to build it. Players can build independently, but often they are required to work collaboratively. The game spreads over two days of monastic life, with turns being allocated as time for study and toil or for services in the abbey. At each service a new abbot is elected and apart from going first in the turn the abbot also has some significant powers. In order to win the game players must collect the letters of the abbey’s motto ‘Libera Nos Quaesumus Ab Omnibus Malis Amen’. The letters become progressively more expensive and players must decide whether to buy letters or recruit extra monks. Points at game end are also awarded for the ‘blessings’ which players can collect throughout the game. REVIEW BY COUNTER MAGAZINE Ragnar Brothers 2-4 players, 90-120 minutes designed by Steve Kendall Phil Kendall & Gary Dicken reviewed by Stuart Dagger A 19th century American writer famously observed that Wagner\'s music is better than it sounds. Replace ``better\'\' by ``less complicated\'\' and you have the first comment that needs to be made about Monastery. When I first sat down to read the rules, I gave up half way through and went and made myself a cup of tea, before coming back and starting again. It is not that they are in any way badly written or badly explained, more that the initial impression is of a game that is all detail. It was similar when I came to teach it to the others in my group: glazed looks and mutterings of ``this game needs a pair of shears\'\'. Fortunately, once you start playing, it does all slot into place quite quickly, and by the end we were all agreed that what you are meant to be doing had been clear and the level of fiddliness nothing like as great as we had feared. The idea of the game is that each player has a team of monks engaged in the building of a new monastery. At the start of the game only the central abbey exists. The other buildings are on tiles and the players will add these to the complex each round. However, these placements only site the buildings; to get them up and functioning they then have to be built. The monks gain points for helping with the construction work and also for doing the other standard monkish activities of study, toil and prayer. These points are not victory points but act as a sort of currency which you use both to buy victory points and to recruit extra monks to your team. So adding extra buildings and gaining victory points are both two stage processes. The next complication is that the buildings fall into several families each with its own placement restrictions and scoring methods. Then there are the rules for what monks can and cannot do when they move around, and finally there are three different types of round. Almost all of this detail flows naturally from the theme, but the volume of it is initially daunting. As with Martin Wallace\'s Brass, this is a game where the owner will need to learn the rules before the session at which they will teach it, and they must be prepared to field lots of questions as the other players try to find their feet and to remember the details of what you said earlier. If the game goes its full length, it consists of two ``days\'\' each of which is divided into 10 rounds. Of these, three are church services, three have an emphasis on study, three on toil, and the tenth is for sleep. In the church service rounds all that happens is that players draw more building tiles and a new abbot (= start player) is chosen. The night round is also light on action: it being just being a case of ``all monks return to the abbey\'\'. It is in the study and toil rounds that the real activities takes place. Study and toil rounds both consist of ``placement & movement\'\' and then ``scoring\'\', and players take it in turn to do the first before taking it in turn to do the second. The placement part is the obvious one of taking a tile from behind your screen and adding it to the array. You have more than one tile behind your screen and so have a choice of what to play, but it is a very limited one. Moreover, by the end of the game you will be looking to have played all or almost all of your tiles, and so the main decisions you will be making over the tiles you have drawn is not whether to play them but in what order. If you are really desperate, the rules do allow you to exchange a tile instead of playing one, but that will almost certainly mean that you have an extra tile left at the end of the game and this will incur penalty points. The tiles fall into several groups, the two main ones being ``grey/study\'\' and ``brown/toil\'\'. The former are the quiet, contemplative places such as the Dormitory, the Chapel and the Chapter House, and the latter the strictly secular work areas such as the Kitchen, the Bakehouse and the Smithy. Each will have one or more paths running fron the edge to the building and tiles must be placed so that the paths line up with those on adjacent tiles. In addition, you may not place a grey tile next to a brown one, or vice versa, for the obvious reason that it\'s just not seemly to site, for example, the Piggery next to the Library. If you are going to cast pearls before swine, the Lord requires you to have a very good arm. Having two groups that have to be kept apart means that you also need some way of linking them and this is achieved by including Pathway tiles. These come in a variety of configurations and can be placed next to both brown and grey. There are also three tiles - the Infirmary and the Refectory being two - that are dual-coloured and these could also be used to act as a bridge between the two types of area. All of these types - brown, grey, dual and paths - are initially placed with the reverse, ``unbuilt\'\' side uppermost. On this side is a picture of the building\'s foundations, and between one and five circles. In these circles are the numbers 1, 2, up to however many circles there are. For the building to be completed and turned right way up all of these circles must be occupied simultaneously by monks, one to a circle. The number in the circle that he occupies is the number of points that the monk will score for his contribution to the building\'s construction. There are also bonus points to be had in the case of fields (brown), gardens (grey) and paths if they are placed adjacent to other tiles of the same type, provided the network of paths links them together. (This was one of the twiddly bits that prompted the remark about the shears.) Further chrome comes with the ``feature tiles\'\', ``the secret way tiles\'\', the ``prison cell tile\'\' and the ``icon tiles\'\'. The first of these are non-buildings such as the Beehive and the Carp Pond. They do not need to be constructed but are simply placed and so are scored differently. The others fit into the brown/grey groupings, have the same scoring for their construction but then have special properties once they have been erected. Having placed your tile, you now move your monks. Each of your monks will be either standing or on his knees in prayer, and you receive 2 ``movement points\'\' for each of the former. These points can be split among your standing monks in any way that you wish and it costs 1 point to move a monk along a path to an adjacent tile. If you move on to a tile that is ``under construction\'\', the monk must end his move there and occupy one of the circles. Help is required and as a member of the monastery he is obliged to give it. However, if at the start of your movement phase in the next round, the building\'s workforce is still not at full strength, your man can decide that ``he left his rosary in the refectory\'\' and move away. The other obstacle to free movement comes from the idea of a contructed building that is ``fully occupied\'\'. Each constructed building has a number on it that is the maximum number of monks that it can hold. You may move through such tiles but can\'t exceed their capacity by terminating your move there. The ``secret way\'\' tiles also figure in the movement of your monks. Each player has one which is part of their initial allocation of tiles. Once you have built it, you (and only you) can use it as a distinctly unmonkish teleport, taking any of your monks to it from anywhere on the board for a single MP. It\'s not thematic, but as the monastery grows, it is useful to the point of being almost necessary. After everyone has moved, you take it in turns to score. The points for constructing you already know about. You can also get points for praying. Each study or toil round you can drop one of your monks to his knees provided he is the sole occupant of a tile. This brings in points equal to the ``capacity\'\' number on the tile. Once down, the monk stays there, neither moving nor scoring any further points, until the next church service round, at which point he is returned to the abbey and stood up again. The tile you use for your devotions must be an already constructed one - the authorities being quite strong on the idea that holiness is not an excuse for sloth. Monks who are neither praying nor engaged in construction can score a single point provided they are in a completed building whose grey/brown nature matches that of the round and provided a couple of other conditions are met. Having got your points you now spend them on extra monks, on victory points and on ``blessings\'\'. The closing words of the Latin version of the Lord\'s Prayer fall neatly into four sections each of 9 letters. * LIBERA NOS * QUAESUMUS * AB OMNIBUS * MALIS AMEN Each player has one of these groupings on a strip at the front of their screen. The words, with a tile for each letter, are also to be found on a central board which has four rows and ten columns. The extra spot in each row contains a monk for each player. Using the points earned by your monks you buy letters and the extra monks. The cost of each of these items is equal to the column in which it stands. Any unspent points bring you ``blessings\'\' on a basis of 1-4 points = 1 blessing; 5-9 = 2 blessings; 10-14 = 3 blessings; and 15+ = 4 blessings. Blessings are worth 1 VP at the end but can also be used during the game as inducements to other players to help you in the construction of a building and as a supplement in future spending rounds (though this time at the much less favourable rate of 1 blessing = 1 point). The letters you buy will normally be placed on your own letter strip, where they will earn you 3 VP each at the end of the game. However, you can also place them on other players\' strips, thereby denying them victory points. More gamerish than Christian that bit, unless there is a ``Blessed are the dispensers of malice\'\' that I have forgotten about in the years since my church going days. The potential drawback to this particular ploy is that it is usually more profitable to concentrate on your own score: 3 points being better than 1. Also, as soon as a player\'s letter strip is full, the prices they pay for items drop, and you don\'t really want that to happen while your strip is still incomplete and they are looking for payback. The game ends when either everyone\'s letter strip is full, all the remaining tiles are unplayable, or, failing either of those, at the end of the second day. Your final score is the sum of your VP minus the ``capacity values\'\' of any building tiles still in your possession. My game descriptions aren\'t normally this long, and even now there are special properties possessed by the icon tiles and the Prison Cell that I haven\'t touched on and which are of tactical importance during play. As a piece of design Monastery is more a case of patchwork quilt than building frame. That said, it is, for the most part, an enjoyably thematic patchwork quilt, and as I noted at the beginning, the learning curve is nothing like as steep as we thought it was going to be. The game is also pleasingly original both in its concept and its mechanisms. We liked it, not as much as we liked the Ragnars\' previous game, Canal Mania, but then that was our game of the year. This won\'t be, but it is good enough to ensure that it will get repeated play. One final point: We have found, as have others, that an unfavourable initial tile draw can have a long term damaging effect on your prospects. You start with your Secret Way tile plus 3 others that are drawn at random. Three rounds will pass before you draw any more and, in the normal way of things, you will be playing one tile per round. That doesn\'t give you much in the way of wriggle room, and while it is true that the game offers you an ``exchange tile\'\' option, taking it will almost certainly hurt your final score. You need to be able to keep pace with your rivals in the first couple of rounds, or you will miss out on the cheap letters and will be late getting the extra monks that you badly need. Such a tightly prescribed random draw at the beginning of the game makes it quite likely that you won\'t get the sort of tiles you need. My suggestion for dealing with this problem is that you adopt the device used in games such as Tribune of drawing more than you are going to keep and then choosing which ones go back in the bag. So, something like ``draw 6 and select 3\'\' in place of the present ``draw 3\'\'. This won\'t eliminate the risk of being unfairly handicapped entirely, but it will reduce it by a considerable amount.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Ragnar Brothers | Monastery

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