Build your town and defend off monsters

Meeples & Monsters by AEG is a bag-building game. Players can send their villagers to construct new buildings, to complete quests, to fend off the monsters that are besieging the city or to train them into clerics, warriors, mages or knights!

The classes have different abilities and strengths!
In the first phase you may send meeples out to construct buildings or level up one of your meeple classes by spending victory points. Buildings are an interesting aspect: as you start there are only 4 basic locations but players can construct up to 8 buildings (out of 15), so games will always have different actions available. ☝️

In the second phase you can visit locations or attack monsters by assigning meeples with enough strength to the monster card. Locations are mostly about gaining new meeples to improve your bag, or gaining quest cards. A big part of the fun is how monster and quest cards can give you ongoing bonuses to add an engine-building aspect to the game. 😊 Quests give VPs, but monsters are the biggest VP source. The monster deck is also the timer for the game. ⏳

At the end of your turn you draw meeples from your bag (4 at first, then later 5 or 6), and you can start planning your next turn! 🧐

💬 It’s an easy-to-learn game, though we struggled a bit with the iconography.
💬 I do want to highlight the theme and humor of the game, it’s really great! 🥰 The citizens really are meeples - for example clerics have wood glue to “heal” their meeple companions; you fight giant beavers, woodpeckers and timber wolves; and even the quests have punny names like “Sawdust to sawdust”. It’s really fun to notice these jokes and easter eggs! 🙃
💬 Playtime is somewhat long. 🕑 That’s partially a good thing, because with bag- and engine builders you need time to feel you’ve achieved something, but it might be too long here. I wish there was some kind of draft to get starting meeples, to speed up the beginning. Still, turns are engaging and quests do a great job to steer you towards short-term and long-term goals, like having certain types of meeple or defeating enemies of different sets. 👍