Monumental - A civilization game which has everything of a big!

First of all, I want to precise this is an english version, translation of the French one (you can find here) just because monumental is a worldwide project. So maybe it can interest people who does not speaks French to know more about the game. But I am not at all English speaker, so I do my best so that you can understand what I have to say. But please, be sure I apologize for all mistakes you will find in the below article. Hope it will be helpful nevertheless and you will understand and enjoy it!

Many players have already played Cid Meier's games, either video or board games. The Civilization licence is well known, especially for the lenght of the game. Indeed, we have to admit that if the games are excellent, each game can last for hours and hours! And what if we offer you this kind of civilization game, but for less than 2h playing? This is Funforge's bet (who has the excellent EVOLUTION & PATCHWORK in their catalog) with the recent Kickstarter called MONUMENTAL ! What? A KS an you claim you can talk about it mister G? How can it be? Well, because I had the chance to test a prototype, of course... and twice! Let's see what it looks like!!

Monumental, what is this game ?

Monumental is, as we said, a civilization board game. It has been designed by Matthew Dunstan (designer, among others, of Elysium) and will be edited by Funforge. You have to know it, it is a reboot campaign. A first one had been launched months ago, but they decided to postpone it in order to review different points : rules, balance, financial aspect... and to have the time to give the opportunity to us, potential backers, to test the game before the launch of the new campaign. That's done, and believe me, it was worth it.

So we were saying Monumental is a civilization game. Classic one? No, far from it I would say. The game is built around 2 principals axes : central board, broad territory where will fight units to conquer the lands, and the city, which is... a card deck! Yes, we have here a deckbuilding game. But believe me, we are far from the shallow now... hum sorry, just watched "A star is born"... so I was saying far, really far from Star Realms or Magic. Here, you will be able to activate the cards which compose the city through the cross-taping, which will allow you to... oh, wait! Cross-taping? What is it?

Cross-taping is the way you activate your cards. You have 9 cards (3 x 3) in your city, and you will choose one line and one column, so basically a cross, to activate. Then you tap the cards... that is why cross-taping. The activated cards will then produce resources you will spend to develop your army, your production, your scientific research, your culture policy and your gold production! At the end of the day, we are here front of a game which will mix joy of deckbuilding (and combos linked to this), resources management, and a 4X board on which you will use your minis or tokens.

Because indeed, it is possible to get the game with minis, which contributes a lot to the immersion. We will discuss about it later, the quality of the minis is really amazing. But as not everybody can (or want to) invest for this cosmetic part, those who prefer can stay with the classic edition, which means tokens instead of the minis. This is of course a lighter version, so a cheaper version.

Now we have said that, let's enter more into detail about the gameplay, I am pretty sure you want to know more!

Context

Who is talking about civilization game is talking about great People! And here, YOU will be the leader. In Monumental, you will lead one of the greatest faction among the 5 of the basic version: Hercules' greeks, Mulan's Chineses, Ramses' Egyptians, Siegfried's Vickings and Miyamoto Musashi's Japaneses. And if you go for all-in, you will get Aztecs, Atlanteans, Munghals and Amazons. Far enough to get memorable fights and conquests :-)

So, you take the lead of one of these factions in order to bring to glory. You will have to develop your people through the ages and on many aspects : military conquests, scientific knowledge, cultural policies and... building of powerful Wonders! And for this, it will be essential to develop your city, nevre center of your growing empire, where your resources will be produced. But Rome was not built in a day, and to rise your empire will takes time. You will go through 3 eras, starting in the classic era, then the middle-age, to end your journey in modern era. Will you be the one who built the Great Wall... or the Statue of Liberty ?

Game material

Here is the most amazing part. The less we can say is... there is a lot in it! For now, we have only been able to see prototype, of course, but this is already so good quality. So we can easily imagine that the final will be awesome. What should I start with?!

Let's start we the board : he is a modular one, build with hexgonal tiles. This alread show good replayability (don't know if we say this in english... means life time of the game with same players, something like that :-)). And this allow to easily adapt to the number of players (1 to 5). Each tile is illustrated so that it represents one of the different lands of the game: volcano, sea, plain, forest... very nice work which is a solid base from a visual and gameplay point of view.

Where we step it up a notch is, in my opinion, with the cards. Each player have 21 cards for its civilization. Certain are unique, others are common for every player... but if they are "common", this is only by their effects. Because each illustration is linked to its faction, which offer even more immersion. To this, you add "basic buildings" which are available for every players for the whole game. And then, the big part : cards of different ages. I do not know how many there are (you can go to the KS page, it is probably written there), but believe me there is a lot. And each of them have a unique illustration. To make it simple, on those we had the chance to see the illustration (as I said, it was a prototype), almost all of them could have been the box artwork. Really fantastic illustration work there, you can see this on the pictures below (here again, take into consideration it is prototype and because of the sleeves, and my Iphone 6, colors and lights are not perfect).

Last but not least : Minis. I have not had the chance to play with it. But I have seen it. And believe me, I have seen many minis (Warhammer among others) and they are pretty cool. The quality is awesome, lots of details everywhere, even base units are really well designed. The finess of each mini is amazing, at the point you can see hieroglyphs on Ramses' one, and you can spend long minutes to analyse every details of Mulan's and Siegfried's armor. Of course, these minis have a cost, and not everybody can afford it, but for the immersion, lisibility of the game... and the pleasure to get this under our brushes, it is really worth it!

We let you appreciate the wonderful work of Studio Giraldez, who offer us amazing paintings here!

Of course, then you can add all the tokens (each of them nicely illustrated too, in particular those for the city-estate), resources and gold (here you have the possibility, as an add-on, to get metal coins). I think you understood there is a lot to deal with in the box, and all of this is really great job, that's the least we can say.

Gameplay

I will keep it short as the article is already quite long. Each of its turn, the player will be able to activate cards in its city. As said previously, this is the cross-taping mecanism... The city is composed of 9 cards. Different type of cards exists in the city deck :

- BUILDINGS : these are basic cards as they represent the main part of the deck and they are the cards which produce resources. For example, at the beginning of the game, the Fort produce 1 militay resource while the Library produce 1 science resource. They do not give victory point at the end of the game.

- KNOWLEDGES : we can easily identify them because they are bleu. They come in the city under a building card and add its own effect/production. They are activated at the same time than the building. They give 1 victory point at the end.

- WONDERS : They have a beige color, and are played as buildings. But, they can be bought in 2 times (2 wonder stages) and offer a bonus when the construction is achieved. Then, they are considered as building offering their effects, which are often really powerful !! Really important, when you achieve a wonder, you have to place its token on one tile of yours, adding +2 defense. Last but not least, they count as 2 points at the end of the game.

So get back to the explanation of a player turn. We activate one line and one column. Concerned cards will produce resources and/or activate effects. Then we can spend these resources in the order we want. We have 4 types of basic resources in this game:

- SCIENCE, in bleu. It mainly allows to buy Knowledge cards. But we can spend 2 science to play one additionnal cards of the deck too.

- MILITARY, in red. Use it to move your units on the board and conquer tiles. You can move either soldiers, warlord or explorators.

- PRODUCTION, in black. Really important resource as you buy new buildings and wonders with it!

- GOLD, gloden token (or metal coins with the add-on). It is a "joker" (but still a basic resource) you can use to replace any of the three previous one.

Spending your resources in the order you want is REALLY important. This is what will start powerful combos. But you have to know that basic resources not used at the end of your turn are lost, excepting gold. One advise here : you should realy pay attention to the order of the action you take. Because if you prepared correctly your turn, it can be really powerful but if you do not, you will realize during your turn how you could have optimized everything. But of course, if everybody says "oh wait, I start again, this is not what I wanted to do...", the dynamic of the game will be badly impacted. So prepare your turn well, you have the time to do so during your opponent turns :-)

Coming back to the turn, you can spend your resources by :

- Moving your units : Explorators will take the production tokens spread on the map and go to City-estate where they will find market (it allows to win precious effect or one-shot resource). Next to this, warriors with the help of the Warlord will conquer tiles. Each time they will defeat Barbarians, inhabitants of the land you want to conquer, they will get a bonus. Warlords all have powerful effect which activate when they conquer a tile, once per turn.

The system to conquer is quite simple and does not use any dice (Yeaaahhhh!) : each tile has a defense value. You add this to the amount of units on the tile, and it gives you the number of units you have to send there to conquer the land. Ex: a plain with a value of 1 has 3 barbarians on it. You have to send there 1 + 3 = 4 warriors/warlord. Simple but efficient.

- Buying cards : it is possible to spend resources to buy cards in the "river". It offers at all time 6 possibilities. It is possible to buy one or more of these cards at your turn. In addition to this, you have "Basic Buildings", which are upgraded version of the buildings you have in your starting deck, always available for everybody all game long.

- Playing one additionnal card spending 2 science resource

- Building half or an entire Wonder (wonder stage)

Last but not least, cultural policy. During the game, you will be able to develop cultural policy (cards aside of your deck, 5 of them) by spending another resource which is Culture. It is a specific resource, lot more rare, not included in the "basic resources". So it is much more difficult to develop these cultural policy, but they bring you more victory points at the end of the game (2 per policy) and have one-shot and long term effect really interesting.

And you go through the ages like that, turn after turn, until the lasts cards in the river. After the last card of the river deck is discovered, we finish the turn and then we have one additionnal turn to optimize everything. And we count scores.

Final counting :

- Each Konwledge card = 1 PV

- Each Wonder = 2 PV

- Each Cultural Policy = 2 PV

- Each controled tile = 1 PV

- We count majority on each of this criteria, each majority gives 3 points to the player (if majority shared, each player score 3)

For those who read untill here, this is a short version of the rules. There are additionnal details, but it is not important to feel the atmosphere of the game, neither the mecanism ! If you want to know more, you can watch these videos : Dice Tower or Man vs Meeple

Jeu Demain, qwhat do you think about it ?

I have to admit, this is a real punch in the face! First thing I immediatly appreciated is that for every of your turn, and starting with the first one, you have a lot to do. In this kind of games, you can often be frustrated because you have to focus on one or two aspect of the game. But here that is not the case, you can and have to develop on everything at the same. Up to you to find the perfect balance so that it leads you to the victory. Impossible to get bored, even for one second!

Second point is that for such a deep gameplay, the game lenght is really short! I mean, to find a game like this which takes less than 2 hours, not really easy! Here, after the 2 - 3 firsts games where you will learn the rules and read the cards, we can easily imagine games of 1h30 or even less. Honnestly, it is a very good point as it means the games will be played more often, even in the evening (not that you have to wait for the weekend to play it). Of course, this is a game which will not like players who take to much time to play a turn... but like every big games! In short, it is a big game which concentrate in a short duration, and we love this!

Add to this an amazing material, a "replayablity" which seems to be very good (even more if you take the 9 civilizations), good dynamique, it is really a full house! I have only played it 2 times, but I really want to play it again to try other civilizations, other strategies, etc... In term of balance, hard to tell, but I played with 2 different people and won the 2 times, with tight scores. Have only played at 4 players, I cannont tell more for other configuration. But as you already understood, it is a very good game in my eyes, and to pledge it was an obvious... and it was the case for the players at played with too! This article is already too long, I will stop here even I could continue to talk about this game for pages. Here is the Facebook Page (here) and, of course, the KS page (here) Hope you enjoyed, and see you on the KS page ;-)

#Jeu