Overboss: A Boss Monster Adventure

Overboss: A Boss Monster Adventure shares a setting within the pixelated Boss Monster world. Brotherwise Games’ earlier title featured wonderful retro artwork, reminiscent of 8-bit computer games. Overboss takes that art style and then raises the ante…

In Overboss, up to four players compete to be not just the boss monster of a dungeon – but the Overboss of the world above! The core mechanisms here are tile drafting, and then tile placement. Each player has a double-sided player board, which is a grid (3x4 on one side; 4x4 on the reverse for a longer game). You’re drafting tiles that represent different terrains, with set collection in mind.

There’s always four tiles up for grabs in a public flop. Partnered with each tile is a random token. This will either be a monster type (for one of the terrains), a terrain crystal (for bonus scoring), a miniboss (extra points), or a portal (swapping tokens around). On your turn you draft a tile-and-token pair. You place the tile somewhere into your grid, and the token (if it’s a monster) sits on that tile. (Otherwise it sits off to one side for you to use later.) Each terrain type scores in different ways. Some, for example, reward the specific location of the tile. Others pay out in a majority means. There’s ten different terrains – plus mandatory Dungeons – and you always play with five of them. This means a whole lot of modular set-up!

You earn bonus points if you can place matching monsters in their favoured terrains. (Vampires in castles, witches in swamps, and so on.) You also score points if you can have same monster types sitting in ‘bands’ (rows/columns). Half of the battle is not only drafting the terrain tiles to score them… but also picking ones that have appealing monsters.

Overboss also has asymmetrical ‘boss’ player powers, offering further unique gameplay. There’s also take-that actions you can add in. Arrange your terrains to match prerequisite patterns, and gain a free action. Well, you could use them to attack an opponent’s grid… Or you could use them to rearrange your own! It all boils down to the question: how bad an Overboss are you?

Player Count: 1-4 Players
Time: 20-30 minutes
Age: 8+