Meeples & Monsters

Citizens of Rowan have been altered to the presence of dangerous monsters, besieging their walls. Their only hope is that the peasants can build new locations, train to become heroes and defeat the incoming monsters. There’s just one problem… the citizens are meeples. They know they’re meeples, so don’t worry, we aren’t destroying their narrative. In one of AEG’s wackiest thematic concepts, let’s dive into the world of Meeples & Monsters. I promise any jokes will not be… wooden.

The Game

Meeples & Monsters is a bag builder, much like Quacks of Quedlinburg, but the gameplay is more closely related to a deck builder like Dominion. Players start off with two secret objective cards a basic bag of seven white peasants and four grey meeples representing corruption. You draw four from your bag and place them in your tavern board. These meeples are used to take actions, which include building new locations, fighting monsters and recruiting clerics, warriors, knights, and mages into their tavern. All of these characters have special powers if you level them up, as do the paladins, rangers and shamans that may appear if the buildings are drawn from the stack.

Once all your meeples have been placed out, you return all meeples on the board to your tavern’s rest area. Effectively, your discard pile. Then you draw back up to four. If you can’t because your bag is empty, throw all your meeples in your rest area back into the bag.

In the four quadrants, you have three slots for monsters to be potentially harassing that sector. The more monsters there are in a coloured sector, the more it will influence the actions you take. For every monster over one, an additional white meeple will be added to the action spot you take, which means another peasant will be added to your bag, potentially clogging things up.

You keep going until you draw a Dark Council card, which lets you draw an extra meeple but gain an extra corruption. When the third Dark Council card comes up, you have two turns left in which to attack as many monsters as you can or defeat the overlords to score a huge amount of points.

Final Thoughts

Deck building is one of my favourite mechanisms. I think it’s a lot of fun to be able to adjust your strategy, game on game depending on what’s in front of you and the cards that come out. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some downsides.

Like most deck builders, Meeples & Monsters takes a few turns to get started. You have to get through everything in your bag first and the grey corruption meeples are actively in the way. You gain extra ones throughout the game, but they don’t do anything unless you have the Towers Mini expansion, which unfortunately is a Kickstarter exclusive at the moment. However, once you get your combinations going, you can have some insane turns, drawing a whole bunch of meeples out at once to take on the bosses.

One of the great things in this game is that the actions are never blocked by anyone, so you can plan your turns between yours and your neighbour. The only exception is targeting the monsters or the recruitment of the elite classes, which get three on the board when the building comes out. But since a new monster comes out anyway, and the elite class meeples cost you another meeple, it’s not the end of the world.

The theme is very well thought out – all of the creatures and characters are depicted in meeple form, including the dragon meeple, which I couldn’t quite figure out what it was for, other than a first player marker. And the natural enemy of the meeple is clearly the beaver so having that character thrown in, especially when it’s so adorable. The artwork too is really good, especially on the meeples.

Kickstarter

Something that is a huge benefit to Meeples & Monsters vs another deck building game is the take down is super quick. Because the meeples are so big and colourful, it’s really easy to separate them out. However, weirdly I found it best if the meeples are facedown or on their side because it makes it easier to see their colour and I don’t quite understand why the corruption meeples were just left grey and didn’t have a cool corruption mark on them. It’s not necessary but it’s a “nice to have” and since most meeples got something, it seems weird the grey ones are just blank. It’s worth mentioning that the retail version (which Zatu have waiting for you) does not appear to have the screen printed meeples my Kickstarter edition does, likewise the embraided bags.

Overall, Meeples and Monsters is a really nice variation on the deck builder/bag builder mechanism with a great theme that really appeals to the gamers who will pick it up. The production value is great, although I’m not sure how the Kickstarter version I have differs to the base game. I really enjoyed my playthroughs and the sheer size of the objective card stack means you’ll be unlikely to get the same combination twice in a handful of plays. Add to that more monsters in a higher player counts, different building combinations in the market, and just different playstyles, Meeples and Monsters will be a hit for a lot of games groups.