Monolith
A three-dimensional territory abstract in which the board is not a surface but a skyline, and controlling the top of a stack is worth more than owning the ground beneath it.
Monolith is played with 90 wooden blocks on a 7x7 grid. A turn is either place a block on an empty cell or stack it on a neighbouring stack, up to a height of five. Nothing is ever captured, nothing is removed: the board only ever gets taller and more tangled. Scoring at game end is by column, not by cell. A column's score equals its height multiplied by the number of adjacent columns that are shorter than it, so a three-block tower surrounded by five one-block stubs is worth far more than a five-block tower walled in by four-block neighbours. Highest total wins, and there is a small end bonus for any column that is strictly the tallest in an unbroken line of four.
That scoring rule is the whole game, and it is a genuinely original one. It means height alone is worthless; what you are actually buying is a skyline view, and the board rewards you for being tall in a neighbourhood of short things. The result is a game that plays nothing like a stacking game and nothing like a territory game, but sits in an uncomfortable, fascinating middle. Your first instinct is to build as high as you can, and your first game will end in a crushing loss because your opponent spent the whole time building low walls around your towers, capping your value. Around game three you start understanding that the real fight is over which columns get to be the tall ones, and that sometimes the correct move is to build your opponent's column one block taller than it wants to be.
It is heavy in every sense. Forty-five minutes is optimistic for a first play, the three-dimensional board makes it genuinely hard to read lines of sight, and the final scoring maths is the kind of thing you want a notepad for. The physical production is excellent but the towers do fall over when the table gets bumped, which has ended at least one game of mine in a way nobody was happy about. It is also unforgiving: a badly planned block on turn eight can cap the score of a column you spent twenty minutes on, and there is no way back. For players who want the deepest abstract on the shelf and do not mind the paperwork, this is the one to beat this year.
The Skyline Arithmetic
The scoring formula hides a brutal truth: height is a multiplier, not a value. A column that is five blocks tall surrounded by four-block neighbours scores exactly zero, while a two-block column with two shorter neighbours scores four. The arithmetic rewards being tall in a local dip, not being tall in absolute terms. This means every block you place changes not just one column's height, but the score of every adjacent column whose relative height shifts.
Because adjacency is not spelled out as strictly orthogonal, the number of potential shorter neighbours matters enormously. If diagonals count, a central column can compare against up to eight others, making the five-stub example in the review coherent; if only orthogonal, the game becomes tighter and corners become near-useless. Before teaching, pin down which interpretation you are using, because every scoring decision flows from that single ambiguity.
A Turn in the Tower Garden
Early turns feel like placing seeds: you put a block on an empty cell, deciding whether it will become a future tower or a future wall. Once stacks reach two or three high, every placement becomes a lever. You might add a block to your own tower for raw height, but you are more often adding a block to a neighbouring column to reduce an opponent's shorter-neighbour count. Raising a stub from height one to height two next to an opponent's height-three tower doesn't touch their tower, yet it can cut their score from nine to zero if that stub was their only shorter neighbour.
The five-height cap creates a quiet endgame pressure. A column at height five cannot be raised further by anyone, so its score is permanently frozen unless you can change the heights around it. This turns the late game into a board-wide negotiation: every block you place either freezes a column's value or unfreezes a neighbour's, and the board becomes a web of dependencies rather than a set of independent towers.
Early Height Is a Trap
Your first instinct is to build a tall central tower early and watch it dominate. That tower immediately becomes a target for low walls: every block your opponent places next to it that is shorter actually increases its score, so they will happily surround it with height-one stubs to bait you into building higher. Then on a later turn, they raise one of those stubs to height two, and the tower's bonus evaporates without a single block being added to the tower itself.
The trap is that your investment in height is fixed, but the neighbourhood is not. A corner tower is safer because it has fewer neighbours to manipulate, but that safety comes with a lower ceiling: with only two or three adjacent columns, its maximum possible score is proportionally small. Central towers offer the highest potential but require you to control every surrounding column at the end of the game, which is nearly impossible against a competent opponent.
Teaching and Setup
The physical setup is trivial: an empty grid and a pile of blocks. The real setup cost is mental. You cannot teach Monolith by explaining the turn structure and then hoping the scoring clicks later; you need to build three or four sample columns and walk through the multiplication aloud. Show a height-three tower next to two height-one stubs and one height-four neighbour, compute its score as six, then raise one stub to height two and show the score drop to zero. That single demonstration teaches the entire game.
The three-dimensional board makes line-of-sight hard for new players, especially when trying to spot the unbroken line of four for the end bonus. Encourage players to stand up or rotate the board during the game, and accept that the first play will run past the box time if anyone is still learning the scoring. A notepad for final tallying is not a sign of failure; it is the correct way to play.
Longevity and the Notebook Problem
Monolith does not have random setup or hidden information, so repeated plays against the same opponent become a deepening conversation about which columns deserve height and which deserve to be walls. The mastery curve is real: after five or six games you start seeing multi-turn sequences where you bait an opponent into overbuilding a column, then punish them by capping it at height five so it can never improve its neighbour count again.
The fiddly endgame maths and the topple risk are the two things that will decide whether this stays on your shelf. Groups that play in a quiet room on a heavy table will love it; groups that play in a café or with drinks on the table will curse it. If you can tolerate a notepad at game end and the occasional catastrophic reset, the strategic depth is unlike any other abstract you own.
What we like
- A genuinely original scoring rule that inverts the usual height-equals-power assumption
- Three-dimensional board creates unusual, non-obvious tactical patterns
- Deep and rewarding after several plays, with a real sense of mastery developing
- Excellent component quality and a striking table presence
What we don’t
- Final scoring is fiddly and genuinely wants a notepad, which slows the endgame
- Towers topple when the table is knocked, which can ruin a game state
- Punishing for newcomers; a single misjudged block can be unrecoverable, and the first game runs well past the box time
Verdict
The most interesting abstract design I have played this year, with a scoring rule worth the fiddly maths. 9, with a small deduction for the topple problem.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I really need a notepad for final scoring, or can I just do it in my head?
- You can try to do it mentally, but the multiplication per column plus the line-of-four bonus becomes unreliable after a long game. A notepad or calculator app keeps the endgame from dragging and prevents scoring disputes.
- What happens if a tower falls over during the game?
- There is no official recovery rule for a toppled board. In practice you will either reconstruct the state from memory, which is rarely exact, or agree to restart, so stable table space matters more here than in most games.
- Can I place a block on top of an opponent's stack to ruin their score?
- Yes, stacking on a neighbouring stack does not care whose blocks are there, so you can add to an opponent's tower. That usually helps them by increasing height, so the more common sabotage is raising the columns around their tower to erase its shorter-neighbour bonus.
- Why would I ever build a low column on purpose?
- Low columns are the control levers of the game. A height-one block placed next to an opponent's tower counts as a shorter neighbour for them, but when you later raise that block to height two, it stops being shorter, cutting their score without touching their tower.