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Moesteiro

In Moesteiro, from Pythagoras Games, the 2-4 players are competing to build the Monastery of Santa Maria da Vitória. Players choose a medieval Portuguese king as their sponsor, giving them a special ability but also determining their turn order for the round. Moesteiro tho' is primarily a worker placement game where the workers are represented by dice: initially two conventional six-sided dice and a large custom d6 (1,1,2,2,3,3).



The game is played over five rounds, and activation order at each location is in ascending order of the numbers on the dice. The lowest rolls will get a better exchange rate of pips for resources; higher rolls will obviously give you more resources but subject to a smaller multiplier. You're not simply at the mercy of the dice, however, because the design from Luis Costa and José Carlos Santos (aka Rôla) offers plenty of scope for dice mitigation and manipulation. You can at any time move your marker along a track to add a pip to a die, but your position on the track has an impact on your end-game scoring - so adding pips to your dice will effectively be at the cost of some points.



Advancing along the food track gives you access to more places where you can spend wood and stone to add village buildings, earning you points and often additional bonuses. Elsewhere, there are opportunities for set collection (tiles representing stone ornamentation and stained glass windows). Ultimately tho' it's placing out monastery building tiles that will earn players the most points, and these require a certain degree of progress on the game's building track.


Moesteiro then is a very well-designed medium-weight eurogame that plays in a brisk 60 minutes. It's attractively presented, with art by Chema Román and Pedro Soto, and it's highly interactive because what actions you take will almost always impact on other players. If, for example, your die gets bumped to a later position at a location, you can find that the resources you wanted have already been taken by others before you get to take your action... There's scope too for scuppering another player's plans to nab a high-scoring monastery building piece by nipping in ahead of them to 'contribute' to the build so that the score for the tile becomes a much-reduced 3 points shared: an unholy case of deliberately unhelpful 'cooperation'.


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