I’ve been playing video games for a long, long time, and while I love holing myself up and pouring hundreds of hours into RPGs, I’ve been hearing the siren song of table top gaming for a while now. I recently had the chance to attend Origins Game Fair, a huge table top gaming convention in Columbus, Ohio, and I am now a believer. I sampled dozens of great games over the 5 day convention, but the best game I played was Brotherwise Games’ Boss Monster. If you like retro video games, cool pixel art, and have at least one friend, you need Boss Monster.
Boss Monster is a game where players take on the role of one of the titular Boss Monsters, building dungeons for adventurers to come and… well… die in. It’s easy to learn, fun to play, and takes minutes to set up since it’s solely a card-based game. Players take turns adding rooms to their dungeons and baiting adventurers from town to come seek out the treasures that lay inside. When adventurers die in your dungeon, you get their souls! If they somehow survive, you get wounded. First to ten souls wins, but get five wounds, and you’re out of the game.
Since its creation in 2014 via a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign (the game raised $215,056 of its $12,000 goal), Boss Monster has gotten three add-ons – Paper and Pixels, which adds 14 new cards; Tools of Hero Kind, which adds 26 new cards and introduces items to the game; and Boss Monster 2, which can be played as a standalone sequel or added to the original game. Oh, and you need this playmat (I bought one!).
Stay tuned for a full review of the game. In the meantime, head over to Brotherwise Games to purchase Boss Monster and start collecting souls.
