Grab your lab equipment, it’s time to create some monsters in a new game from Sky Lion Games. In Making Monsters, players are stocking their lab with materials to build hideous, and sometimes cute, monsters that will impress the scientific community. This bag building, press-your-luck game from designers Jonathan Gilmour-Long and David Gordon mashes up familiar mechanics to create a monstrously fun game.
Stocking the Lab
In each round of Making Monsters, players will secretly place orders for new materials that you need to build a variety of monsters on your individual lab boards. All players have the same order cards, but outwitting your neighboring players is important. Each order card has a basic action and a super action. If your super action color matches your neighbors card, you’ll get more control when pulling materials out of your bag along with a bonus.
Making Monsters is a bag builder where you’re trying to curate a mix of meat, goop, spikes, and other materials that will bring your creepy creations to life. After assigning material tokens to your monsters, you can choose to animate them and bring them to life. This game is all about timing, because the more creatures you animate in a single turn, the more bonus prestige you’ll be awarded.
Watch out, because rot tokens can ruin your plans. Your lab board will have a “rejects” line which causes a catastrophe when it fills up. Filling your rejects line will force you to animate your monsters, but you’ll miss out on any bonus prestige that would have been awarded. No matter what, each time you animate monsters, you’ll wipe your lab board and gain new material for your bag.
Making Monsters has this really cool central board that gives each player access to three specific material types along with two board upgrades. At the end of each round, this central board rotates, changing the offerings for each player at the table.
The Mad Scientist Fair
Every round inches you closer to the Mad Scientist Fair that takes place at the end of the game. Once the end of the game is triggered, players will choose their favorite monstrous creations from previous rounds and populate their lab. You’ll simultaneously pull items from your bag, assigning them until you feel like stopping. Your goal is to re-animate as many creatures as you can without busting by filling up your “rejects” line.
This is where knowing the contents of your bag is crucial. You need to understand what materials are available and pick just the right monsters to fill the five spaces on your lab board. The player who has gained the most prestige over the course of the game will become the envy of the mad scientist community.
Delightfully Monstrous
I’ve played Making Monsters at least a dozen times now. The artwork and bag building mechanics really drew me in. You’re creating such wild creatures throughout the course of the game and each puny name brings a little chuckle around the table.
Once you get the rhythm of how the round flows in Making Monsters, gameplay is pretty much simultaneous. After everyone reveals their order cards, players are pulling tokens from their bags, assigning items to their monsters. You’re often watching to see if your opponents will animate monsters in the round to guide you on how much you want to press your luck. The bonus prestige points you can earn when animating more than 3 monsters can be a big deal.
There are a couple items in the game that are helpful as you navigate your mad scientist dreams. Each player has access to a lab robot called L.E.S.T.E.R. This is represented with a deck of five cards that help you gain prestige, new materials or give you wild mutation tokens. L.E.S.T.E.R. is triggered in a couple different ways and is always really helpful.
Players can also add upgrades to their lab by using three spots at the top of their board. This is a way that players can help mitigate bad luck, earn new materials or gain prestige outside of the animation action.
Final Thoughts
Making Monsters feels like a whimsical take on the role of Dr. Frankenstein as you try to re-animate these monsters. Because of the simultaneous play, the game moves quickly as you press-your-luck each round. The artwork and interactions with neighboring players does a great job of drawing you in. If bag building and action selection are mechanics that you enjoy, Making Monsters is a game that you have to check out.
Making Monsters launches on Kickstarter on September 16, 2025. Drop by the campaign to get in on this monstrous fun.
A prototype of the game was provided for this coverage. Components and rules covered in this preview are not finalized. Read more about our preview policies at One Board Family.
