Does the Monk work?

[Rooster6975]

Am very new to this game, I find it one of the most difficult games to wrap my head around. Twice my gaming group has tried to figure it out, and twice we ended up throwing in the towel. I posted a bug to the bug forum because no matter what I tried, I could not get the Monk to replace 1 white die with 3 yellow. I actually found someone else had submitted that exact bug, although long enough ago that it had expired with no action. I freely admit it could have been me, but finally we just ended up not using the Monk in our games.

When I initially clicked on the Monk, it allowed me to spend 5 coins to place a Meeple on it. Then I selected a white die, clicked on the card, and was surprised to see it created a cube on the card. The following turn, I again selected a white die, and then clicked on the Monk, a second cube was created (but no yellow dice). The third time around, I selected the cube, then clicked on my white die. The game waited for me to do something, so I clicked on the Monk card and it returned an error, "you must select a white die to use this card". I was selecting the white die. I kept trying a different order to use one of the cubes to turn my white die into 3 yellow, but every time it resulted in the same error. Finally I unselected my cube on the card, selected my white die, and clicked on the card..... another cube (sigh).

Does anyone know if the Monk actually works?

Thanks.

[robinzig]

It's been a while since I played Troyes here, and I did find the interface wasn't the easiest to use - I can't imagine it's very easy to learn the game (which as you observed isn't a straightforward one to learn from scratch) from the BGA implementation.

So Monk is one of the cards where any dice you use on it, rather than allowing you to do something then and there, give you cubes that you can use later to modify another action. That's why assigning dice to the card gives you more cubes. In order to use a cube already on the card, iirc you have to actually click on one of those small cubes - as it seems you managed to once.

When you did, you said "The game waited for me to do something" - with this card the cube allows you to temporarily (for the purposes of one action) convert a white die to 3 yellow of the same number. So I believe you next need to select a white die, and then use those as you would any other set of yellow dice.

I do wish things were more intuitive in this implementation - I suspect it was one of the first games here and doesn't have any of the things players have come to expect from more recent implementations. It would be nice if the BGA team revisited and improved the "old" games like this but they must have other priorities

[Rooster6975]

Interesting, thanks for the reply. So the 3 yellow dice never actually make an appearance? If I understood correctly, the game was waiting for me to take a 3-yellow action as if I had 3 yellow dice, but without actually showing me 3 yellow dice? OK, I think that makes sense. If I can get them to give the game one more try, I'll try it out.

I started to become convinced the white dice in general were buggy. Later in the game, I tried to put a white 3 in the Cathedral. There were no dice in the Cathedral at the time. The error message kept coming back, "You must use a white die" (or something similar). I was clicking on my white 3, and then clicking on the Cathedral in the upper right, and it would just throw that error over and over. Finally, I just passed in frustration. But what is odd is that the other player selected both my white die and his own, and placed both in the Cathedral. I read the rules and it clearly says you can place 1-3 dice to work on constructing the Cathedral, so I should have been able to place my single white 3.