We’ve been sitting on this review for a few weeks, but since the new Skytear Horde Campaigns is currently crowdfunding, we thought it would make sense to put this out now instead of later!

Skytear Horde: Monoliths is a standalone expansion for the Skytear Horde game system: this is the first expansion.  This is a tower defense game!  This game system is an odd duck for player counts: it is a solo game (1-Player), cooperative (2-Player), or competitive (2 or 3-Player) tower defense game.  The game type is closely tied to the player count!  We will only be discussing only the solo and cooperative gameplay today.  

Skytear Horde: Monoliths was on Gamefound back in May 2023 and delivered to my house in May 2024. They said it would take a year to deliver and they weren’t wrong!

We reviewed the original Skytear Horde back in March 2023: See our review here.  We liked the original Skytear Horde enough to make our Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2024, which is why we picked up the expansion! 

Let’s take a look at this standalone expansion!

Unboxing

This is a smallish box: see the Coke can above for scale.

The original game (which had the deluxe box) is a little bit bigger.

This is mostly a card game: although there are some punchouts and a rulebook, this is an expansion with 250 new cards.

There are 3 new Alliance Decks: Green, Red, and Blue (see above).  Recall that the solo and 2-Player games have each player take an Alliance deck: they are 40 cards of goodness per deck (for 120 cards of Alliance decks).

The good guys are protecting their Castle: they choose one of 6 new Castles at the start of the game (see above).

Of course, there has to be a big bad for the players to fight: the expansion comes with 3 new Epic Monsters! See some above.

There are three new Horde decks (87 cards total): see above.  Recall that the Horde decks are the “Bad News” decks that summon bad guys monsters that you have to fight!!  The type is notated in the upper right, with the difficulty marked on the very bottom: each deck can be configured to be harder or easier based on the difficulty icon on the bottom.

There are a set of portals that control the summoning rate of the Horde: see above.  There are a different set of Portals for solo, co-op, and competitive modes.

There’s some new cards (Roots and Troops) …

Altogether, the new cards are gorgeous with art consistent from the original game.  

There are also some tokens, of which you will need some! 

I have the original deluxe version of the original game, which comes with the playmat AND some plastic tokens.  Even if you have the plastic tokens from the original game, you still want some of the tokens from the expansion to play!

Basically, the temporary tokens (with the white middle) are really necessary to track temporary statuses. I found this out the hard way (during my first game) that you really do need these temporary status tokens.

Overall, the expansion looks good.

Rulebook

This new rulebook is 24 pages.  This is important because the original rulebook was only 16 pages: we’ll see why this is important in a second.

There is mention of a video for learning the game on the cover: we prefer learning from the rulebook (so we can lookup things easier later).  But, it’s good to know there is an official video.

Skytear Horde: Monoliths gets an A on the The Chair Test: I can see the rulebook on the chair next to me, the rulebook stays open, and the font is pretty readable.  Weirdly, there seems to be a lot of white space: I would have preferred a bigger font and less white space?  The white space choice bothered me. Otherwise, it does very well on The Chair Test.

The Components page is very good at listing all the cards and pointing out features of each set of cards.  See above.  I spent a decent amount of time on this page correlating the cards to the Components page: I feel it’s important to touch and see all the components as a step towards understanding the game. 

It’s a good Components page.  The token discussion was quite nice (on the opposite page) as well.  

The set-up is quite good too: See above. Interspersed in the text, there’s even suggestions for monsters and characters and bad guys for your first game!  Thanks Skytear Horde: Monoliths!  My first game(s) were easy to set-up!

The rest of the rulebook is pretty good too.  

I ended up keeping pages 12-16 open and active as I played: it just seemed easier to help me keep track of where I was in the game.

This was a pretty good rulebook, but not great.  Recall, from our review of the original Skytear Horde that we felt the rulebook could have been a little better.  They have definitely evolved the rulebook: it’s better, more readable (especially for the first-timer or virtual first-timer), but it still doesn’t have lots of examples or FAQs or edge case discriminators.

In both one and two-player game, a bunch of questions came up as we played, and we struggled to find some edge cases (Can we attach an item to a compatriot or only ourselves?  If we “kill” a minion, but something heals it, does it reactivate to Pillage? How does a Castle get minions if it can’t engage?).   I am sure there is something online (the designer seems very active in the BGG forums), but I wish there had been a little more in the rulebook.

There’s a table of Contents (yay … see above), no Index (boo), but there is a Glossary (yay … see below)!

This was a pretty good rulebook.  I want more edge case rulings or a FAQ, and the white space bugs me (but I am pretty sure that is a me thing).  In general, the rulebook has evolved for the better and I was able to jump in pretty quickly.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Skytear Horde: Monoliths is pretty much the same as the original game, but with new ideas peppered in (Troops, temporary armor/attack, new Hordes, new Alliances, etc).  If you liked the base game and just want more, this is a perfect expansion.

I ended up playing with the plastic tokens and game mat from the original game, but I didn’t need them: they just made the game spiffier.  You can play the whole thing by itself without needing the original game.

That’s pretty much what I did: I wanted to see all the new content, so I only played with new stuff!! Monoliths!

The rulebook (by being a very nice guide) has made the gameplay “seem” smoother in the new game, even if it’s just a by-product of my imagination.  

Nothing in the expansion is ground-breaking, mind-altering, or life-changing.  It fits in the basic flow of the game easily and just adds more stuff.

Solo Mode

So, Skytear Horde: Monliths follows Saunders’ Law and there is a viable solo mode.  In fact, I almost feel like this is a solo game first, and then the cooperative and competitive modes are afterthoughts … well-developed afterthoughts, but not the primary way to play.

As proof, the cooperative mode is listed as an afterthought AFTER the solo play is explained ..

… and the competitive mode is listed after the co-op and competitive modes. See pages from the rulebook above.

I really do like that the solo mode is a pure solo mode, where the solo player takes control of just one Alliance deck!  Solo is so easy to jump into; I picked the blue Alliance deck (above) and was able to start playing pretty quickly!

My first solo game went really well, but I realized I was cheating a lot!  Not on purpose, but I just kept missing a lot of nuances and edge cases (like I said, I wish the rules were a little better on edge cases!)

Once I got a few more games under my belt, the solo game became a much more interesting puzzle!  See above as I just barely win with 1 Alliance card (just 1!) after defeating the Epic Bad Guy!  I just barely won and it was glorious!

It took me about 3 games to feel like I got all the nuances.  The first few learning games were fun, but I think you need a few games under your belt before the game starts firing on all cylinders.

Playing Skytear Horde: Monloiths solo reminds me why Skytear Horde originally made my Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023! This is a fun puzzle! And Monoliths is more of the same!

Cooperative Game

This time around, I was able to get the 2-Player cooperative mode played … you might recall in our review of the original Skytear Horde, I never was able to get my friends interested in playing!  Luckily, I have been doing a lot more 2-Player co-ops lately, so I was able to get both Sam and Teresa interested in playing!

Unfortunately, these games didn’t go quite as smoothly.

Although it seems a natural extension of the solo mode, as each co-op player takes an Alliance deck, the game didn’t seem to play as smoothly.

It seemed like we were playing a little more multi-player solo than really cooperating.  Sure, we needed to discuss what monsters to engage, but there didn’t seem to be as much cooperation as I had hoped.  

One thing that seemed to really keep us down was that the Mana allocation was lesser (it’s only +3 per round) for two players.  It felt like it was harder to get things going in a 2-Player game because of the Mana restriction … and that was more frustrating.

We also had some bad luck, even with the Mulligan in set-up rules.

I feel like it would have been nice to have a few more cooperative mechanisms:

• share Mana?  The small portions of Mana might have felt less debilitating if we could apportion the Mana?  Say “the team” gets 7 Mana per turn to apportion as they wish, instead of 3 each?  This can help mitigate bad card draws.
• share Attachment? At the time we played, it was unclear whether Attachments could go to the other player. I think, after some hunting through some rules, that Attachments can go to either player.  This needs to be stated much more explicitly!
• share cards?  Not necessarily “pool cards”, but it might have been nice to have a mechanism to share cards better?   Maybe each turn players could swap one card?

I wanted more cooperation in my cooperative game.  Don’t get me wrong, the cooperative game works, but it felt more like multi-player solo.  That maybe a good thing for some people: a lot of people don’t like it when the Alpha Player (see our discussion of Alpha Player Syndrome here) tells them what to do!  The cooperative mode definitely avoids some of the Alpha Player pitfalls, but at the cost of some cooperation. Caveat Emptor: this may be the perfect cooperative mode for you and your friend! I just wanted more cooperation.

The cooperative mode just wasn’t quite as smooth as the solo mode.

What I Liked

I like Skytear Horde!  The Monoliths expansion gives me more of the same … in a good way!

The card art is pretty phenomenal.  Even when we were having a bad cooperative game, my friend Teresa said “I really enjoyed the cards and art“.

Speaking of the cards, they are well-notated, easy to read, and usually very clear. 

I really love the solo mode.

What I Didn’t Like

Even with the Mulligans during set-up, sometimes you can get completely screwed by a bad card draw.  We had to take a Pillage of 11 cards (like more than 1/4 of our deck) during the first turn because we could get nothing going!  I am pretty sure that’s why we had such a bad first cooperative game, but there’s not much you can do to mitigate the randomness of some card draws …

It would be nice, for example, to have a choice of two cards when you draw (when you kill a monster, you get to draw a card).  Currently, there is no mitigation of the luck-of-the-draw: you just get the card you get.   It might be nice if we got to choose the card we got?

The rulebook needs a FAQ or some more edge cases description.

Conclusion

I like Skytear Horde and I like Skytear Horde: Monoliths.  It’s great that Monoliths is a standalone expansion (so I can just play the new stuff) or an addition (so I combine old stuff and new stuff).   There’s nothing ground-breaking here: just more of the same, in a good way! If you like Skytear Horde, you’ll like Skytear Horde: Monoliths!

I think I prefer Skytear Hordes: Monoliths as a solo game.  The cooperative mode is pretty good, and maybe perfect for you if you want to avoid the Alpha Player in your games (at the cost of some cooperation).

This is a good game with a good production: we recommend it wholeheartedly for the solo player, and a little cautiously to the cooperative players.  Hopefully our review will help you figure out if this is something you would like.