Last Defense at Hudai Monastery

This is a solo tile-laying defense game in the events after "Last Stand at Hudai Pass".

Players: 1

Components: tiles, cards, meeples, cubes, bag

By Achim Zien · 1 player · 30...45 minutes · complexity 5

You sent out your most fierce monk to stand against the master demon at Hudai Pass. In a treacherous turn of events, a portal has opened in a nearby cave and minor demons sprawl up the mountain towards Hudai Monastery. You must act quickly to raise your defenses and overcome every single last one of them.

In the game Last Defense at Hudai Monastery you build up the defenses of the monastery, command your monks to fight the onslaught of demons and implement new techniques to become more efficient at both. If you manage to defeat every demon in the demon card deck, you win. Let too many of them through or take too long and you fail.

## Components

The game requires components from the Meeple Mini Expansion (MMX).

* all 56 cards (54 with icons, two "star cards")
* all 36 tiles
* the bag (MMX)
* red, blue, yellow and green cubes
* all 7 meeples (MMX)

## Setup

1. Set aside one tile of each symbol and randomly arrange them in a line from left to right. This is your base wall. Put all remaining tiles in the bag and give it a good shake and scramble.

2. Draw two random meeples and put one one the second tile from the left, one on the second tile from the right of the base wall. Lay them down. These are your monks and they are not charged with Qi, yet.

3. Search the cards with the green background and take a 1 and a 2 of each symbol. Overlap these two cards per symbol such that a track of three fields emerges: symbol, 1, 2. Put one blue cube on each symbol. On the Hammers symbol, put another one. These are the six techniques you can research. Each start on the basic level and can be upgraded twice.

4. Take the cards with the yellow background and shuffle them. Remove 6 cards without looking at them. Do the same with the cards with red background and stack them on top of the cards with yellow background. Finally, put the remaining cards with blue background on top. You should have a stack of 30 cards, shuffled by background color. This represents the demon hordes attacking you and you win by eliminating them all.

5. Put the card stack furthest from you, the yellow star card closer and the green star card closest to you. Leave some room above your base wall. These cards mark the Stunned, Approaching and Attacking rows of demons.

6. Draw the first six cards and arrange them from left to right next to the yellow star card (approaching). Each card represents a demon and should be associated to exactly one tile in your base wall. The demon with the arrow immediately advances to the attacking row.

7. Set aside 11 red cubes to represent the monastery's integrity and return the rest to the box. When you run out of integrity, you lose the game.

8. Set aside 11 green cubes to represent the time left before you are overrun and return the rest to the box. When you run out of time by removing your last green cube, you lose the game.

Some values in the game may be enhanced by techniques. For your convenience, these are marked with (+technique).

## Play

Play proceeds in turns until you either win by defeating the last demon or lose by losing your last point of integrity or time.

In each turn, you will play through three phases:

1. Build
2. Act
3. Demons

After each turn, remove a green time cube from your reserve.

### Build

Draw 2 tiles from the bag (+technique) and decide on one to add to your wall. Tiles can be added only above the six base wall tiles and must be adjacent to another wall tile. Put the unused tile(s) to a discard pile.

If you ever need to draw a tile from the bag and cannot, add the tiles from the discard pile to the bag and scramble them.

### Act

Activate two distinct monks on the wall.

When you activate a monk, you can move them by one tile horizontally or vertically (+technique) and then use the tile they are standing on. After that, use one (+technique) of the adjacent tiles in any order .

If a monk was removed from the wall, you cannot activate them any more. Instead, you can spend the activation to select one of the remaining monks and put them on any tile, charged (standing up).

You can discharge (lay down) any monk that is charged (standing) to deal 2 damage to the demon in their column (+technique). If the monk has the color matching the demon card's border, deal +1 damage. The grey monk adds +1 damage on demons with yellow background.

If you have generated technique points, you can spend them to increase your techniques (move the technique marker to "1 pip" for level 1 and "2 pips" for level 2. Level 2 may only be developed after level 1. Level 1 costs 1 technique points, level 2 costs 2. You cannot keep technique points for the next round. Note that Hammers must be upgraded twice for each level (may occur on separate turns).

Mark any damage you deal to demons with yellow cubes on their card. Cover each pip with a cube and put the final cube on their symbol to show that they have been defeated. Thus, a demon with 4 pips takes a minimum of 5 damage to defeat.

### Demons

1. Remove all demons that have damage equal to their hit points (hit points: pips on the card +1).

2. Remove all demons from the Attacking row and remove one integrity for each hit point they have left. Also, apply their special effect. You may mitigate the integrity loss and reduce it one-by-one if you decide to lose the topmost tile in the demon's column (not the base wall).

3. Move all demons from Approaching to Attacking. Move all demons from Stunned to Approaching.

4. In each column that is missing a demon, draw a card from the deck and set it into the Approaching column (pushing down arrow demons to attacking).

## Symbols

The symbols share a common meaning over tiles, techniques and demons.

 Hammers
 Circles
 Bricks
 Sun
 Arrow

### Techniques

If your technique is level 2, apply the effect of level 1 twice.

## Challenge

If you want to increase the difficulty, try any combination of these:

* Draw six starting tiles at random. This will lead to more scenario variability.
* Replace the six cards with blue background and instead use all the cards with red or even yellow background.
* Reduce the number of green time cubes.