Boss Monster review

Brother Wise Games | Card Game | £24.99 | 2-4 players | 20 minutes | www.brotherwisegames.com 

When you’re playing a dungeon crawling game have you ever stopped to think about the poor monsters you’re slaying along the way? Or what about the boss of the dungeon who has spent ages carefully planning where to place all the cunning traps and hiding zombies round the corners ready to leap out at you? No, of course you haven’t, you’re too busy celebrating when you find some rare loot… you heartless swine.

Well Boss Monster is a card game that tries to change all that by putting you in charge of building a dungeon and filling it full of fiendish trap or monster rooms that will take care of any heroes that stumble inside. You and up to four other players must choose from a selection of cards that represent potential rooms for your dungeon, e.g. a Brainsucker Hive full of monsters or The Crushinator, which is a trap room full of lethal spikes. Your dungeon consists of five different rooms, although throughout the game there are times when you can swap things around or place new rooms on top of existing rooms, if you feel they’re not working. 

Tactical building of your dungeon is key to maximising the amount of damage on any heroes that are attracted to your deadly home and some rooms will work together – if placed alongside each other – to have extra buffs or even potentially send heroes back through the dungeon. What’s more, certain rooms will attract different classes of heroes so when you’re playing against three other players, you’ve got to decide whether you’re going to specialise in a particular type of hero to attract into your dungeon or go for a scatter gun approach. The final icing on this tactical card cake is the superb 8-bit style graphics that really help to bring the dungeons to life. Being bad has never been so good! 

Buy a copy here

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