AMIGO Games Richard Garfield's Carnival of Monsters - Deck Building & Set Collecting Board Game - Explore Magical Lands & Capture Exotic Beasts 240 Cards | Ages 12+ | 2-5 Players

Really fun, fast paced game. Cool creatures design. We enjoy the card passing aspect.

My family (all adult-aged) has fallen in love with this game. The artwork is stunning and really enhances the game. I introduced it at our weekly game night (4 player), and everyone requested to play it again the next week. Gameplay centers around card drafting, where you select one card and then decide what you want to do with it — play it now or hold it for later — before you draft the next card. Different types of land cards are collected, and the points from those cards are used to catch monsters that will provide you victory points for endgame scoring. Gameplay was about 1.5 hours, but will be less now that we’re all used to playing it. There’s not much player interaction, except maybe drafting a card so that someone else won’t have a chance to get it, but the game went over really well with our group and is now one of our all-time favorites. (As a point of reference, some of our recent favorites are Godfather, Ethnos, Dominion, and Isle of Cats.)

This was our new 2019 Christmas game we played after opening presents. We are Richard Garfield fans and enjoy this one a lot too.Great artwork and quality of cards. The coin tokens are also nice thick cardboard, and the pictures are aligned (unlike 7 Wonders coins!) and each coin denomination is a different color with different artwork...even a Cthulhu-esque style art.My teens are daily players of Magic the Gathering (MTG) and so when reading the rulebook we translated terms into that. For instance, you have to spend land to capture monsters, thus we "tapped" the used land so we know it was used. We also recently played 7 wonders again and were translating terms, like Seasons in Carnival of Monsters would be Ages in 7W.On your turn, you either play the card you took (after passing the remaining cards) or pay 1 coin to keep it for a later time. Once played or kept, then you draft the next card from the deck passed to you.Having this "reserve" of saved/kept cards is really nice and the last season most of us are spending all our land to get out those last few "bigger" monsters to add to our menagerie.Just like 7W, there is a randomness that comes with the cards dealt and passed during the draft. But there is also a good strategy of do you go all one or two land types, or focus on objectives, or focus on capturing monsters, etc.One son went all monsters and would have won, but because he took the Danger penalty (the monsters he captured were more dangerous than the number of hunters he had available to contain them) that he had to go into big debt and lost the game for himself (even though he still beat me in points).My only negative is there isn't as much variety of ways to get points, as in 7W, so the strategy decisions are a bit less. But like 7W, you have strategy in seeing what types of cards others may take and do you keep it for yourself (you need to pay that 1 coin to do so or play it) or pass it and play a card that benefits you more instead (basically, block others or get points for yourself).The objective cards can really generate more points than you realize, so don't ignore them either.Even though this seems to have a lot of resemblance to MTG and 7W having had a baby, this doesn't replace either of those games and has a different enough feel that we enjoy it when in the mood for a different flavor drafting game.

A really fun card drafting game with great art, high quality components and rich strategy. The game is easy to learn (you play lands that then enable you to capture monsters worth points. The most points at the end wins) but has a lot of strategic depth as there staff you can hire and secret goals that award you points also at the end. Highly recommended.

A huge amount of content, variability, steps to take and ways to go during the game. Carnival of Monsters gives me more enjoyment even than Res Arcana!

Little confusing to Begin but ding dang. It's one of my favorites now. It's a game of building a monster zoo. Highly recommend!

Came missing cards. We only got 9/10 main starting lands cards

I enjoy this game very much in a group of 4. I was much less entertained with the 2 player version but that is usually the case with card drafting for me. The art work is very good. It is card drafting with some Victorian era monster hunting theme.