Workshop Wednesday: Meeples & Monsters, Agricola & Carnival of Monsters

Due to popular demand, we will now be teaching three games on Wednesdays.

This Wednesday we will be playing Meeples & Monsters, Agricola & Carnival of Monsters.

Meeples & Monsters: 6.8

The peaceful city of Rowan is surrounded by dangerous monsters. It’s up to the citizens to fortify the city, train up warriors, clerics, knights, and mages, and defend Rowan in Meeples & Monsters!

Meeples & Monsters is a big, beautiful bag-building engine builder by designer Ole Steiness (Champions of Midgard and more). Depth, replayability, beautiful components, and a splash of meeple humor will have you coming back for “just one more play” game night after game night!

During a player's turn, they draw meeples out of their bag and use those meeples to perform various actions on the board. Those actions include upgrading your meeples, adding new meeples to your bag, fighting monsters, investigating towers, or even upgrading the town giving players even more options on future turns. At the end of a player’s turn, all the meeples they drew are put onto the “lodging” part of the player’s board.

During the game, players will score victory points by defeating monsters, completing quests, and investigating towers. At the end of the game, players will score additional victory points by fighting boss monsters and through end-of-game quests. The player with the most victory points wins!

Agricola: 7.9

In Agricola, you're a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. On a turn, you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you'll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first, you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?

The game supports many levels of complexity, mainly through the use (or non-use) of two of its main types of cards, Minor Improvements and Occupations. In the beginner's version (called the Family Variant in the U.S. release), these cards are not used at all. For advanced play, the U.S. release includes three levels of both types of cards; Basic (E-deck), Interactive (I-deck), and Complex (K-deck), and the rulebook encourages players to experiment with the various decks and mixtures thereof. Aftermarket decks such as the Z-Deck and the L-Deck also exist.

Agricola is a turn-based game. There are 14 game rounds occurring in 6 stages, with a Harvest at the end of each stage (after Rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14).

Each player starts with two playing tokens (farmer and spouse) and thus can take two turns, or actions, per round. There are multiple options, and while the game progresses, you'll have more and more: first thing in a round, a new action card is flipped over.

Problem: Each action can be taken by only one player each round, so it's important to do some things with high preference.

Each player also starts with a hand of 7 Occupation cards (of more than 160 total) and 7 Minor Improvement cards (of more than 140 total) that he/she may use during the game if they fit into his/her strategy. Speaking of which, there are countless strategies, some depending on your card hand. Sometimes it's a good choice to stay on course, and sometimes it is better to react to your opponents' actions.

Carnival of Monsters: 7.3

The Royal Astrological Society counts among its members the most renowned and respected experts in monster lore throughout the entire empire. Each year the Society permits only a single new member to join, so applicants compete to prove their worth with the most magnificent menagerie of monstrous beasts they can find... and capture.

To aid in these quests of discovery the Society grants every aspiring astrologist a small stipend, which they can use to hire additional experts and fund their journeys to the magical lands where the most exotic beasts reside.

After four seasons of hunting, would-be members present their collections at the organization’s annual banquet, an event known as the "Carnival of Monsters".

Carnival of Monsters is a card-drafting game in which players try to collect sets of Land Cards so they can capture and display strange and exotic Monsters, hire talented Staff to help run their enterprise and pursue their own Secret Goals. Points are awarded for displaying Monsters, completing Goals, and earning Gold Crowns (Crowns) over four “Seasons” of play.

In the end, the player with the most profitable and spectacular carnival is the winner!

Come join us on Wednesday, November 1 @ 6:00 pm to learn any of these games for Workshop Wednesday. See you soon! 

*This event requires a 1-Day Membership, credit will be applied back for qualifying purchases. Current Members are always free for this event.*