Bored? Game! Boss Monster


Boss Monster should appeal to video game fans – it was created very much in homage to retro videogames. Each card makes a reference to a popular video game, or a video game trope. There were a couple of snickers every time we read a card when I played it. Even the box itself looks a little familiar…

bossmonsterboxThe aim of Boss Monster is to be the biggest, baddest boss in a side-scrolling dungeon by defeating heroes who foolishly try and take you on. Bwahaha. At the beginning of the game, everyone is a dealt a ‘Boss Monster’. During each turn, players will build ‘rooms’ for their dungeon, then compare with other players to see which dungeon has attracted the heroes that have appeared in town. Each room has a different type of treasure value, and heroes have their preferences for certain types of treasure depending on who they are. For example, a mage-type hero might like lore-type treasure, represented by a little book icon, so will go for the dungeon with the most book icons (or, as we started saying, ‘book smarts’). After it’s been decided which hero is going where – and sometimes nobody might have a dungeon that heroes even want to raid – each player ‘deals’ with their heroes.

Heroes have health, and each room in your dungeon deals damage. If you knock out a hero, you get their soul. If they successfully survive all the way to your boss monster, they deal you damage. 10 souls wins you the game, 5 souls makes you a loser.

On occasion, you might be able to use a spell card to hinder the progress of your rivals, or boost your own dungeon. But these are difficult to come by – you start the game with two spell cards and can only draw more if you’re clever/lucky enough to build rooms that let you.

While the game itself was interesting in concept, and the cards were clever and full of suspiciously familiar references, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It’s partly because the mechanic that means everyone taking the time to run collected heroes through their dungeon, and the imbalance of the availability of spell cards that allowed you to interact with other players meant that it felt quite isolated. I felt like we were playing the same game, but very much separately, rather than playing the same game together and genuinely competing. I’m not sure that this would change with more players, given how the game is set up with a very specific turn order, but maybe luck would change and there would be more chance of spell cards coming out, which would make it more interesting. It’s lonely being a Boss Monster, apparently.

bossmonster1

Designer: Johnny and Chris O’Neal
Publisher: Brotherwise Games
Mechanic: Hand management
Number of Players: 2-4
Length of Game: 30 minutes
Complexity: Easy-Medium


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