Monumental Review - with Tom Vasel

[Music] and now it's time for another diced our review with Tom vassal hey everybody I'm Tom vassal today we're taking a look at a game called monumental monumental is well quite a big game that's the name of the game for Matthew Dunston Matthew Dunston has made a lot of games that I really enjoyed chocolate factory Elysium and so I was excited about this one it's also from fun Forge whose quality is extremely high it's also been a really long time since this was kick-started and stuff so I was excited to see it come it was it's a civilization game that moves through history and you have different things I assume at this point I go into civilization games assuming that the theme won't be tremendously strong but this one did have some cool pictures some cool I mean just the the cover itself looks really cool the people attack each other and I was really pumped about it and I was hoping it would be an easy game to get into well let's take a look at it [Music] in this game each player is gonna pick a faction so this is one of the factions the Egyptian faction you'll get a leader so here we have Ramses - this is the his card shows movement defends and also special ability first time he conquers the province get to production here actually is Ramses himself you also have several soldiers explorers and outposts and so you're gonna take all these and put them on a base on a map players are also going to have some culture cards here that are very specific to their culture and a deck of cards now these cards are all fairly similar where libraries work camps and forts but there's also some specific cards in there for each of the factions themselves each player is gonna deal out at city this is a 3x3 grid of cards with the exception of knowledge cards if you put a knowledge card out you get to put another card on top of it so it like gives you an extra card and this is your city with the rest of your cards being a draw pile that's nearby now on a player's turn they're going to activate one row and one column in their cities so if maybe I want to activate this bottom row and there's last column it's up to you which row and which column so basically you're gonna be activating five cards at the end of your turn you're gonna be discarding those and then using the deck to fill in the new spots that you had in this area and if you activate a card that's on top of a knowledge card you'll be able to use that knowledge so for example this one here says pay two basic resources to get a gold now most of the cards are going to give you basic resources there are three types of basic resources we have production black blue his science and red is military you can take these basic resources as you tap them so you'll see these all give one of each of those different things but you can only keep those and use those on this turn Gold which can be kept from turn-to-turn well it allows you to basically act as a wild resource of whatever you want and some things will give you culture which is going to allow you to by your culture cards and sometimes when you activate buildings they'll give you a special ability like this one here says lets you archive a card or pay two basic resources to gain a culture archiving a card means pick one of the cards that you did not activate that turn and basically removing it from the game or and then culture like I said you can get to use to buy these different culture cards let's talk about production first production can be used to build more buildings in your city essentially get another card there's always going to be three cards here laboratories workshops and archery ranges that provide to science to production or to military that you can buy or there's going to be a row of cards the game is split into three eras 1 2 & 3 although if you want to make the game longer you can also add the Renaissance welcome to it each of these is going to have a bunch of cards that are going to be coming out and each turn the if a cards not bought one of these goes away so this is going to be constantly moving and it's going to direct the flow the game when this deck runs out the game is going to be over and there's all sorts of things you could buy in here for example this temple cost for production when you activate it you simply get a culture this mathematics here costs three science and now when I activate this in the future I'll get another science there also this market here costs three production then gives a gold and these are going to get better as you go through and you get to the level three like for example here's Radio later on that's going to get to culture although that will cost to science or perhaps get this industrialization here which lets me build a wonder section for free or this Factory which gives me three production the other thing you can do with production is you can build wonders of the world when you get bill to one or the world you'll take it you'll put a marker in front of it this wonder the world the Hanging Gardens cost three production and you're going to take this card and it will allow you when it's finished to copy the bonuses of your cultural policies and when you build it you get a culture but you're going to need to build it twice you need to pay three cold a three production and then three production again and then it's built and gets added to your deck you can only be building one wonder of the world at a time unless there's a special ability that supersedes that when you build these any card really it goes on top of your deck so you'll be able to draw at the end of your turn and immediately get it out into your city military is gonna let you move around the map so you're gonna be building a map based on how many players and what kind of game you want to play and and you'll have a starting city where you'll have all your stuff to begin with but you can use military points to move to in adjacent tile you can even move through your own tiles to get to an adjacent tile and when you move in to attack a city you're going to need strength equal to a random token that's there as determined by the map plus the defense of that so this would be three I would need to move three into there so maybe I move these two and I move in Ramses himself to get in there I get to conquer it I'll then flip the tile over and I get one of the two things here I can take one gold or I get to production if I conquer this one here I get one gold or two science sometimes you'll find a free city here not only do you need to conquer that with here the three military but you also pay whatever else the cost is in this case it's three gold and then here I get one culture or for matching basic resources there's also trading cities you can find the here Babylon to get and use these you need to move your Explorer your explorers are not units they don't attack or defend you simply pay one military to move them around and if they end or spot one of these turns they'll get these production tokens these are just like the black production tokens except these are permanent and lasts from round around you don't have to use them all up in that round if you end in a trading city you can look at all the tiles and choose one so I don't want three gold for science to culture or for production all those are pretty handy and useful and you'll take one and then put the rest back you can attack other players if you have a higher military force than they do you'll just remove them and they come back to that area as the game goes by and you build wonders of the world you're going to have to place those wonders of the world and is that you have and in fact somebody else can conquer it and take over it and since they're worth two points at the end of the game since only one wonder can be in each tile although wonders do add to the defense of tiles so there's no dice in combat you simply just need to spend enough military to be able to move in culture can be used on your turn to put a culture card into play the first culture card you play cost one culture than two culture etc when you put a card into play you get a bonus on it so for example this one here says take a basic building so I can take one of those buildings that gives me two production or two military but now gives you a special ability so if we're here the first time I gain a barbarian token each turn I get both bonuses that's pretty cool then I could later on let's say build another culture card on top of that one and when I put the other culture card on top of it I get both automatic abilities so I got a basic building and I can reinforce a card reinforcing lets you pick one of the cards you activate it on a turn and leave it on the table but now I have a new special ability the first time you archive a card each turn gained two gold and so you can get you can kind of quadruple or quintuple your bonuses but you're only ever gonna have one of these in play at any given point in time so you have to as the game goes through decide which of these is going to help you the most the game's gonna end after the final round when the last cards run out of the deck made up of era one two and three cards and then scoring is really simple each province that you control is worth one point whoever has the most gets three each knowledge card that you've collected the blue ones over the course of the game is worth a point most is three wonders of the world are two points each most is three and each of these cultural policy cars you've gotten to play is worth two points and the most in play is worth three and then whoever has the most points is the winner there are three modules included with this game you have an autumn a where you can play solo so that's included with the game you also have a pile these are just a few of them of different heroes you can pick these you pick a couple stick them in the deck and the we'll show up and you'll be able to take the matching character use that character but it's going to return so that other people might take it and then you have monsters when you turn over a barbarian tile there's always the possibility that it will show a monster name on it and then these monsters will come out and attack you or cause all sorts of problems so you have miniatures for each of these monsters and/or heroes and they're just little modules that you can stick and you can play with both or either there are five different factions in the game I've already been showing you Egypt but there's also Denmark there is Japan China and Greece each of them comes with their leaders and you can see each of them the first time Ramsey's conquer something he gets production first time Siegfried does military science for Japan draw two cards and use one for mulan and then hercules here gets a gold so they all have a different start there which each of their leaders but then beyond that they have some extra cards so they each have their culture cards but for example the Greeks have philosophy pay a basic resource to get another basic resource gain a military for each fort archery range that you activate and then the culture cards what are you gonna do here this one lets you spend your science to get military or whenever you build a wonder you can pay any type of resource while the Egyptians are good at building they can build two wonders at the same time here I can pay a gold to draw cards and use them or copy a bonus of one of my other cultural things and that's the Greeks while the Chinese here Mulan has pyrotechnics which lets archive a card lets her get rid of cards out of her deck faster and then get a gold if you get at least a science military in production so it's about kind of diversification when you conquer a prophet you can move an explore one tile when you complete a wonder you get cultures so China can move their culture a little faster than the other factions Denmark here has a good chance to move their explored they can also conquer from far away if they have navigation pillaging they're all about conquering the the Danes paid to marry to get a culture that forget culture itself just use it to get the culture from your military and then Japan here can reinforce cards use the same cards over and over again and when I conquer freeze it costs two fewer resources here's another way to reinforce a building or when someone has more problems than you cost - less military to conquer their provinces or when you get a knowledge card you can immediately use it so they each have a very different feel to them but they also all play fairly similarly and you can see that they have different miniatures for each of the different forces also so of course this is the deluxe version comes with various miniatures and the miniatures look really cool there's the guy in the front cover of the box and yes you could use the original guys and in fact it might even be easier fitting all these different models on your starting text is actually not possible you have to set some aside and so this is definitely one of those do you want to see miniatures running around the board or not I don't think they're necessary but they're really cool so it comes with these plastic trays they keep them in I don't know that I would necessarily keep them in the plastic trays I think it'd be easier just have a bag full of the stuff for that particular person these disks are nice they fit on the bottom the cards are very nice quality very good artwork and I especially like how you can tell the difference there's a little icons here in the corner of the cards that show you what faction it goes to but you can tell by the artwork itself usually what faction it is and I thought that was just a neat nice addition I also like to have the monsters looked and the different things that are in there so that's pretty cool the coins that come with the game are like this I have the upgraded metal coins nice but not necessary the one component I don't like are these tokens here themselves like culture are this these plastic discs to me are just not as useful as having actual things that might look like what they are so I have to get this is this is black okay and that's blue yes you can see the color but I think I would have preferred those tokens myself and the hexes are very plain I think compared to the rest but there's so much stuff on them and of course they this pseudo look around it fits yes okay there does hexes at the same time there's you know they're okay they have a little bit information on them and that's all you need but the artwork and all the wonders of the world that I'm really happy with and overall you know comes with these different inserts and stuff it comes with three different rule books one civilization manual which just talks about different saves and gives you maybe some strategy on how to play them you got your straight-up rule book here which tells you how to play you have a scoring board which is okay it's fine it's not that important and then you have the different maps that you're going to build as the game goes by I [Music] really like monumental and there's several reasons for that one you'll never find a civilization game that's extremely strong thematic civilization that's also fairly short so you're not going to find that here although they did a pretty good job at having you move around attack and build up things for as what it is the game itself is gonna vary in its length I would say a two-player game could be done in 60 to 90 minutes three player 90 to two hours four player a little bit longer and in fact I think I like it best with a couple fewer players just because you take your turn and go one and there's also a good chunk of setup there's a big lot of the table space is used up for this game even though the game isn't quite that big especially if you're using the deluxe stuff with all the miniatures that I this is the one that I back so this is what I have now I will say this going in that at its heart this is simply a deck builder game you're building a deck of cards you start with your own custom deck and you put it out in front of you and you're playing five of those nine cards and then you replace them and play five more you're trying to buy better ones to put in your deck and trying to get wonders of the world but you're also going for points and one thing that kind of threw me off when I first played this was the points were are different you're like sitting there and building it up and said Oh wonders or two points controlling area and a board is one point having these cards is one point and and building culture card is one point scores aren't gonna be huge in this game so everything you do counts and you've got to kind of really focus what you're doing my positive points are the five cultures all feel different and even if you play one of these cultures you could play it differently you have those five culture cards and the order you play them in matters like if I build the Egyptian where it says I can work on two wonders of the world at one time great so I start doing that and then I build another culture card I can no longer do that that special ability is gone oh man maybe I should have played that one a little bit later in the game I'm not sure which one do I want first which one do I want second that's a really cool concept and then buying the cards that come out I can be the Greeks and build the pyramids the Hanging Gardens and the Statue of Liberty I like that idea and your but at the same time it's just a simple deck builder you're playing the cards activating them getting the resources spending them it's a really clean system you spend production to build stuff science that by science cards and read to move people on the bore when you're moving people on the board do you want to move and be military do you want to run that explore around try to get to markets and pick up those extra production points very simple game and teaching it and understanding how it works but it looks like a bigger more grandiose game a lot of that's because of fun forge and I think that actually may put off a few people who will see this big grandiose game and go man we could have played this in a smaller area I don't mind and I love the different artwork and I love the factions and in fact there's another box which I'll take a look at later which has more factions in it The Lost legends you know the Atlantis faction is in the game and I like this too this kind of is a realistic history but you have the heroes you have the monsters a couple caveats here I want to point out the Renaissance there's an extra phase to put in there it's between era two and three you put those cards in there so they're a little bit stronger than two a little bit less strong than three this lengthens the game I played it with and without them I don't think you need them you could do it if you just really want to play a longer game and maybe with two players I would put them in monsters are neat although I can see people not wanting to play with them I want to play with them just to see the monster cards heroes are also pretty cool and since you only use a few heroes per game that really offers a lot of replayability to the deck in general solid game this is the write down my wheelhouse of mid-weight well little maybe a little higher than wait but a civilization game that has really strong mechanisms the idea of it being a deck builder which I like and doing deck building in a different way makes me really happy so highly recommend it for me Mon you mental dice our judgment excellent [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 40,661

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10

Id: jJLDPzF1f0E

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020