Monster Pit is a cooperative Boss-Battling game for 1-5 players: it was on Kickstarter back on March 2022. It promised delivery in November 2022, but just delivered to my house about a week ago (April 7th or so). It’s about 5 months late.

This game is for Ages 14+, and takes about 60-minutes to play. There is a solo mode!

Let’s take a look.

Unboxing

This game is gorgeous! It has a similar kind of art as Rescuing Robin Hood (which we reviewed sometime ago here). My group really loved the art!

The Kickstarter version came with an extra monster.

Generally speaking, this game looks fantastic.

Overall, I was very very pleased when I opened the box.

There are just tons of really good looking components. If I had one complaint about the components, it would be that the cards weren’t linen-finished.

Rulebook

The rulebook looks great and very-well produced, but it sometimes was very frustrating.

The rulebook starts great with a well-annotated list of components. This was great!

There’s a quick game overview that gets you the spirit of the game quickly, with a link to a Let’s Play! (I usually just read the rulebook than watching videos, but you may love the videos).

The set-up spanned a number of pages, but it worked well. The set-up described set-up in detail!

So far, I am very happy with the rulebook. The next few pages look great as well. I was able to essentially get through the rules pretty quickly.

The problem is that, as these rules are great for first start-up, they seem to be missing a lot of rules and edge cases and general things that come up in the game. This game makes you think it’s an easy game, but there’s quite a few rules that don’t seem to be fully thought out.

For a set-up and getting into the game, the rulebook was great. For follow up with rules, the rulebook was lacking. I was very frustrated with this rulebook: too many rules seem unspecified.

Gameplay

Monster Pit is all about rolling dice.  You roll dice to see how far the “end of game” token, you roll dice for combat, you roll dice for activating the monster, you roll dice to see what areas of the city get affected … everything is dice rolls.

It’s also “kind of” a worker placement game, as you place your marker on a city space to “do something”.  Each city district has a few spaces where you can activate one of the abilities.  There are a lot of things to activate!

The game summary that came with this is one of the best I have seen: there are enough for all players, and it really does describe all the things you can do when you place your character marker.

This is a Boss-battler: to win, you have to take out the big boss: see Vaiel above.

Each character chooses a board and Captain: as the game goes on, you accumulate more warriors to your board (see above). Each warrior you acquire helps you with more dice, and either defense or offense: each character starts with a Paladin.

Generally, a lot of the spaces on the city board (“worker placement spaces”) allow you to draw a card which helps your captain with a new warrior, a mount, an item, a wizard: see some examples above.

If you can defeat the Boss before the tracker reaches the end, you win! Otherwise you lose.

Solo Play

The game fully supports a solo mode, and it’s easy to play: you just play one character with some scaling factors.

The “end of game” marker moves a little at the start of each round: the solo player rolls some dice and advances the marker that far. Given how many spaces there are on the track, it doesn’t seem to move that fast. I won my first game and it was only half way around.

The game looks great set-up, but I didn’t enjoy solo play. I felt like I couldn’t do very much per turn: the bad news comes out, I get exactly one action, and the night phase comes which activates more bad news. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Although I did win my first game, it felt like there was a lot of upkeep to the one action I had per turn. I didn’t like it.

I was hopeful Cooperative Play would be better.

Cooperative Play

Unfortunately, cooperative play went just as badly as solo play. The dice conspired against us, the end of game marker moved very quickly, but the game still felt like a trudge: it always felt like we were waiting for everyone else’s turn to end. There was a lot of downtime.

Problems

There were generally three major problems with Monster Pit: too much randomness, a poor action economy, and too many rules for a simple game (which were poorly specified in the rulebook).

Just about everything in the game is decided by dice … and that led to a lot of frustrations on all my players. A bad start with bad rolls is hard to overcome, as you can’t get money which means you can’t buy upgrades, which means you don’t do much on your turn. And then the Monster actions are decided by dice. And combat is decided by dice. And bad effects are decided by dice. Everything was just so random.

By itself, the randomness wasn’t necessarily bad: a lot of people wouldn’t be affected by this. The problem was that the action economy, which is about the only thing the player has a choice in, is very poor. You only get one action per turn when you place your marker! In the meantime, the bad news engines of the game are pumping out Monster actions, little monsters, and all sorts of thing to deal with. It was very frustrating that you felt like you only had one action per turn: this was even more frustrating in the endgame when a lot of the places on the board were “blocked”.

The game was too random and my group felt like it had very little agency even when we could act. And we were frustrated that the rulebook seemed to miss explaining a lot of rules.

Fixes?

A simple fix might be to let each player start with one more soldier, one more item, just something so that if your starting rolls are bad, you don’t feel like you can’t do anything.

A bigger fix would be something to allow more actions per turn: Having 2 to 4 workers per turn would make the game feel more engaging. The problem is, that’s a very big change and would require substantial rebalancing.

There is a good game hidden in here, I just don’t think the current version of Monster Pit is quite it.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, I can’t recommend Monster Pit as-is. It would probably get a 7.5/10 or 8/10 for components because it’s a beautiful game! But the game just wasn’t fun in solo or cooperative mode: all of us would probably give the game a 4/10. It was too random, the action economy was out of whack, and the rules were poorly specified.

Having said that, if there were ever a 2nd edition, I would look at it again! I do think there is a good game hidden in here. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough house rules to fix the current version.