Category: Player vs Player Genres: Tableau-building, push-your-luck, budding Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3 Game length: 30-45 minutes Experience: 2-3 games over 2 sessions (2016) with 3-4 players Previous ranks: NR (2016), 73/80 (2018)
Summary - You play as a video game boss trying to build a dungeon that will kill the most heroes. From a deck of cards, everyone assembles components for their dungeons - rooms, traps, monsters. Then the heroes come to the dungeons that are most tempting/evil, and we score based on how well they fare.
Experience - I played Boss Monster a few times in different sittings, but all in one weekend in 2016 surrounding Gen Con. Good company, good fun, not a high-ranking game.
Design - Boss Monster has a neat theme and great 8-bit aesthetic. I've played other games about being a dungeon-master, but Boss Monster's art is particularly unique. The attracting-heroes-phase is also cute. That said, it otherwise lacks specific mechanics that make it stand out, and the decision space/agency didn't seem massive.
Future - There's nothing unpleasant about BM - it's one of the lighter "strategy" games on this list and it plays quickly. I'd like to get a refresher on it to articulate feelings more clearly, but it obviously wouldn't be much for raising its ranking significantly.
I will say the game plays best at 2 and 4 players.
It does NOT play super well at 3 because its too easy for someone to build a winning engine. The expansions also make the strategy more robust.
Boss Monster is a favorite 'opener' on game night to get us all in the mood before jumping into something heavier, alongside other favorite Machi Koro