Monster Pit Review

Part of the Catacombs universe, Monster Pit, isn't a dexterity game. There's still discs but you don't flick them. In the game, players are defending the Citadel from a monster invasion. Each player will control a captain and at the beginning of each round, they'll roll a set of dice based on the available ones from the cards on their player boards. This will give you coins and potentially special abilities. This will also move the monster token along the board based on the amount of monster icons rolled. Next, each player will select an area on the board and carry out its actions. This can involve buying new cards or abilities to help re-roll dice in combat. This is where the bulk of the game will play out. Up next is the monster phase. Here, they'll roll their dice based on their boards and will carry out an action based on how many icons they've rolled. Adversely, another player can choose to play as the monster giving them additional abilities and increasing the difficulty. Then, cleanup. The markets refresh, an encounter card is drawn and you'll do what they say. The game ends when the monster is slain or if they reach the end of their track.

The Good: For such a drastic shift in mechanics, Monster Pit executes it beautifully. The tower defense aspect of the game is nicely executed and it manages that balancing act of forcing combat and bolstering your armies and defenses in an effective way. It can get away from you a little bit if you have some bad rolls and no ways to mitigate them but there's enough ways to take away that luck factor by cards or abilities. The solo mode is well integrated and essentially works the same way as the multiplayer game just without support of other players.

The Okay: There's a lot to do. Almost too many things you can do and there were games that I didn't even bother with certain spaces or districts. Dividing the worker placement spots by districts and limiting the amount of players that can go into them is fantastic but the minimal labeling of the buildings is not ideal. The card backs have the images of the buildings but that doesn't always make it easy to find them. It would have been nice to have them labeled with some iconography of what they do beyond the use of the player aid or rulebook.

The Not So Good: To play the game using the "ideal" layout, you'll need the largest table ever made. A large main board with oversized player boards on each side will make this an absolute table hog. While not a huge issue, it's a bummer that you can't use that layout. There's also a lot of different decks of cards that need to find their way on the table along with a large monster board. There were plenty of cases where I had to look online or the rulebook to figure out exactly what a card meant. I hope that if there is a reprint, an errata is in the works as well.

Final Thoughts: Monster Pit is a part of a genre that I don't always love. Tower defense type games are always overly stressful and give me headaches. I didn't get that with this one though. While there are flaws, there's a lot to love here. Multiple bosses, captains, and ways to increase the difficulty mean you probably won't play the same game twice. Elzra was one of the first publishers I had the pleasure to work with for the page and I'm thrilled to continue that partnership.

A copy was provided from the publisher for content creation purposes.