Boss Monster - Tips & Strategies

SETUP

– Each player gets 15 Room Cards
– Each player gets 5 spell Cards

PHASE 1 BUILD

– The first turn each player build the best 5 room dungeon they can with all their room cards, this includes putting advanced room cards on top of ordinary rooms.

PHASE 2 ADVENTURE

– One at a time each, hero is resolved by seeing which dungeon it is baited to and it attempts to go through that dungeon.
– Any player can use spells to help themselves or hinder another player using the normal spell rules

PHASE 3 SCORING

– First player to 10 souls wins
– Last player to lose 5 wounds wins
– OR Play till all the heroes are gone and see who has the most points

SOLO / SOLITAIRE / 1 PLAYER VARIANT

– Winning condition is set to High Score mode, try and get through as much of the Hero Horde as possible.

Remove all the 4HP heroes and the fool. Epic heroes come out faster and make you to plan out your moves more than usual. It also tends to make the game less chaotic since players are more focused on not getting obliterated by epic heroes instead of throwing spells around to thwart everyone else.

Playing this way definitely improves 2-player games by making them more strategic and less Fluxx-y. As for more players, it depends on how you like your Boss Monster, so try it out and see how you like it.

P.S. I would also highly recommend the expansion, Tools of Hero-Kind, as it bumps the difficulty up enough that you don’t need to remove low-level heroes.

Due to one player’s inaccurate recollection of the rules, we accidentally came up with this house rule, but ended up liking it more than the official way. Rather than flipping heroes at the beginning of the turn, we wait to do it until right before they “leave town” to enter dungeons. This way, the rooms people build are more based on what heroes were left in town and what heroes have already been dealt (since there’s an equal number for each trait). It forces people to pay more attention to the heroes as they come and introduces a bit of gambling feel to building your dungeon.

Each type of room card (Trap Rooms, Monster Rooms, etc.) synergizes really well with other room cards of its type. Pre-plan your early, less damaging rooms with your more powerful, Advanced Rooms in mind to make the most of your initial hand. It’s a lot easier to plan around what you have in-hand than it is to place randomly-drawn rooms each turn.