Review: Boss Monster

Some of the Kickstarter projects I backed have finally started getting their rewards fulfilled.  One of those projects is Boss Monster, a competitive dungeon crawler in reverse.  Players are monsters that compete to be The Boss Monster by building the attractive that both attracts and kills the most heroes from a nearby town.  Players can add rooms to their dungeon (up to 5 rooms max), build on top of existing rooms, or use spell cards that have an array of effects from killing monsters, to locking out a room in another player's dungeon.  Every turn new heroes arrive in town, then players can build on to their dungeon.  Then heroes will enter whichever dungeon is most interesting to them (each room has different treasure types that will attract different hero classes).  If the dungeon can deal enough damage to the hero, the player gets their soul (10 souls win the game).  If they can't kill the hero, the player gets a wound (5 wounds eliminates a player).

There's definitely a lot of strategy in this game that I'm still trying to master.  You don't want to attract heroes into your dungeon if you can't kill them, but a hero that's a wound for you isn't a point for another player.  Having a flexible dungeon that can change what hero type they are attracting can be useful to pull heroes away from another player, but that's not always easy to pull off.  Most games I played I somehow ended up with basically all the Mage related rooms so I ended up with lots of Spell cards, but could only really attract Mages.  But some of the Room and Spell card combinations can be a lot of fun to pull off regardless of how successful it is, like having one room deal a lot of damage and following it with the Minotaur's Lair that sends a hero back to that very room so even the most Epic of Heroes can't possibly survive.

If you can't tell from the box's art, this game is also chock full of retro gaming references from Double Dragon, to Ninja Gaiden, to Karnov.  Sadly, some of the most epic ones aren't available unless you backed the Kickstarter, like the golden Zelda cartridge style box sleeve.  But even without stuff like that, this is definitely a game worthy of getting for you and 1-3 other friends to compete against each other.