You've Activated My Trap Card: Traps & Survival Opportunities (Patreon)

Traps are an important part of monster behavior in Monster. Not only do they allow for a mechanical refresh of the monster's Hit Location deck at a hard to calculate moment, but they also provide a risk/reward limiter for speed. Denying excessive speed builds (most of the time) and ensuring that (almost) all weapons in the game cannot one shot a monster with a single attack.

In addition to this, they provide training tools, expressions of monster personality and a wide selection of different tactical challenges. The experience of fighting against the White Lion and the Phoenix's traps are very different things for example. 

In short, the Trap card, designed initially as a tool to punish the players and reshuffle the HL deck, is one of my favourite mechanics in Monster (as are most of the monster building blocks). However, not all traps are created equal, and there are some interesting quirks and opportunities for smart play which are sometimes overlooked/not showcased. So, today, lets talk about traps.

Flavours of Trap

Traps come in a variety of styles, but the specific flavour of trap depends on what form of Doomed your trap is dispensing. Doomed is the ultimate 'fuck you' move in Monster, it stops survivors from doing almost anything at all (passive stuff still works) and it is this mechanic which makes the trap so feared, even though most of the time it is normal, bog standard reactions that do the grunt work in harming survivors.

Traps come in the following flavours of doom.

• Super traps (Phoenix, Watcher)
• All survivors
• Specific survivor(s) - normally the attacker
• No survivors

We'll walk through each of them in turn, but before we do so, it is time to talk about the hub of this matter, the thing which is often overlooked during play, but is fundamental to the reason that the Doomed ability exists in the first place. And that is survival opportunities, to be more specific, how survival opportunities interact with the trap.

Now, outside of Dodge (any time you take a hit) and Encourage (literally any time you feel like it) and the People of the Sun survival actions (which have zero explanation of when they can be used). Survival actions can only be used when a survival opportunity presents itself. 

• Between actions on the survivors' turn
• During flows on monster AI cards
• After the attacker rolls to wound, but before a monster resolves its reaction
• When the attacker causes a critical wound, after any critical wound effects are applied, but before the card is discarded
• When a monster Is knocked down

There are also the following limitations:

• A survivor may perform each survival action once per round
• Attacking survivors cannot perform survival actions

Also it is important that you note this piece of text: 

Traps

When a Trap is drawn from a hit, resolve it immediately. If a monster is knocked down when a Trap is drawn, it will stand and resolve the Trap. 

To resolve a Trap, end all survivors' attacks and discard all unresolved hit locations, then perform the actions on the Trap card. This does not end the survivor's act, just the current attack(s).

Once a Trap is resolved, discard it and shuffle all hit location cards in the deck and discard pile.

And finally; for the sake of clarity, we shall just remind everyone of the different 'turn types' there are in this game:

• Round - Monster & Survivor's Turns
• Turn - Where either the Monster or the Survivors get their go
• Act - Where the individual survivors have their go
• Actions - What the survivor does with their [Knight] and [Bolt]

What really matters here is the following condition:

A trap ends all survivor's attacks and discards all unresolved hit locations, then it creates a survival opportunity where it is possible to use survival actions like dash or surge before the trap resolves. Often this window is shut by the game having the pending trap doom the survivors (and that is why Doomed exists in the first place), but that is not always the case and we'll look at some examples after we categorise the monster's traps:

Super Traps

Super traps go above and beyond the norm in some fashion with their level of power, they have an extra level of 'screw you' built into their trigger.

• Phoenix - which has Doomed++
• Watcher - which has two traps that instantly kill if both are drawn

All Survivors

The default way that people think of traps working, and it is certainly the most common form of trap.

• Slenderman
• Spidicules
• Lion God
• Lion Knight
• Manhunter
• Flower Knight
• Dragon King
• Dung Beetle Knight
• Sunstalker

Specific Survivor(s)

Currently, it is only the attacking survivor is the one who is punished here, but that is not exclusively the case. So any survivor who has not been doomed has a chance to do some cool stuff.

• White Lion
• King's Man
• Screaming Antelope
• Butcher

No Survivors

Often overlooked, these traps actually have no doomed in them at all and therefore provide a lot of opportunity for neat tricks, even the attacker. This is the rarest category.

• Lonely Tree
• Gorm
• Gold Smoke Knight
• The Hand

Now it is the last two categories we care about here. because these are the ones which leave the survival windows open. We'll use the White Lion and the Lonely Tree traps as examples!

Whilst the attacking survivor is caught here, without a single opportunity to do anything, the other survivors are not. Those other survivors have a window here where if they are in range/reach/adjacent to the monster, they could surge to attack (or dash to position). The really neat thing about this is, the trap is not in the deck, because it has not been resolved right now. So you know that the only hit locations you can hit are the ones left in the deck; the Trap and the discard pile are not going to come into the equation at all. 

This means you are free to spam as high speed a set of attacks as you wish without worrying about the attack being cancelled. Also, hypothetically, if you had the ability to move another survivor, you could move the attacking survivor away from the monster far enough to ensure that the trap would fail to work.

The attacker, no matter what they try and do, is going to suffer the Flower Funnel portion of this trap. But everything else here can be avoided by performing a Dash and survivors who are adjacent to the tree can even get themselves a nice little bonus free attack before they are knocked back (they can even dash if to not get knocked back 7 if they are feeling very survival rich). This trap is not much of a punishment at all unless you are caught without survival actions.

If you look at the other traps in these two categories when they happen, you will see other windows of opportunity where you can undertake clever plays. For example against the Screaming Antelope you can have a reach/range user trigger the trap, and then everyone adjacent can surge to beat on it before it slides away on its teeth.

There is also another interesting wrinkle to these two categories of traps. You can actually find yourself attacking a monster with zero hit location cards to draw. This is an unprecedented situation which the rules do not overtly cover. But reading into the steps, the attacks fail because 'you can't draw a hit location, which means you have nothing to try and wound' because generic, default hit locations do not exist the way that the basic action does.

Don't forget that the Spear Spec/Blue Charm interferes with these strategies, because they trigger when the trap is drawn. The Scythe also has an interesting interaction, where it can critically wound to refresh the deck, but that doesn't put the trap back in. That can avoid the situation where there are no hit location cards to attack in the first place.

So, this is hopefully some food for thought for you all, and it may create some interesting new experiences for your games in the future!