So there I was last Thursday night, setting up Castles of Burgundy for what I figured would be our usual session when my friend Sarah shows up with this expansion I’d been eyeing for months. The Cloisters expansion, still in shrink wrap on my shelf where it’d been sitting since I impulse-bought it at my local game store. You know how it is – you find a game you love and somehow adding new stuff feels like… work? Like you’re messing with perfection or something.
Man, was I wrong about that.
I’ve owned the base game for probably six years now, bought it right after reading about it on BoardGameGeek. Classic Stefan Feld design, dice placement, all that good stuff. Played it maybe fifty times with Linda and our regular gaming group, thought I had it pretty well figured out. Efficient city building, grab animals when you can, pay attention to what knowledge tiles are available. Standard strategy that worked most of the time.
Then we crack open this expansion and suddenly everything I thought I knew gets turned upside down.
The monastery boards look innocent enough when you’re setting up. Just some new tiles, some additional scoring opportunities, nothing too crazy. But here’s what took me three complete games to really understand – these aren’t just bonus point engines you tack onto your regular strategy. They’re timing mechanisms that completely change how you approach the entire game.
First game with it, I’m playing against Mike who’s been into Castles of Burgundy since it came out in 2011. Guy knows every knowledge tile by heart, usually crushes me. I stick to my usual approach – build efficient cities, collect animals, try to complete regions for those completion bonuses. Meanwhile Mike grabs two monasteries early and I’m thinking “whatever, I’ll focus on the main board.”
Big mistake. Huge.
By round three I’m ahead on points feeling pretty good about myself, then Mike starts completing these monastery chains and I watch my lead evaporate. The scoring swing was something like forty points, which in this game might as well be a death sentence. I got absolutely demolished and couldn’t figure out what happened.
That’s when I realized monastery strategy isn’t about completing them fast. It’s about completing them at the right time. The scoring is nice, sure, but the real power comes from the tile selection advantages. Complete a monastery and you get to take tiles from specific depots, meaning you can grab exactly what you need instead of hoping your dice cooperate with whatever’s available.
This completely changes your relationship with dice rolls, which honestly was my biggest complaint about the base game. Bad dice could just ruin your turn sometimes, leave you with nothing useful to do. With monasteries, bad dice become opportunities. Can’t place anything useful on your main board? Work on monastery requirements. Suddenly those frustrating rolls where you can’t do what you planned become productive turns.
I’ve been playing this expansion for about eight months now, maybe thirty games total, and I’m still discovering new interactions. There’s this beautiful cascade effect you can set up where completing one monastery gives you exactly what you need for the next phase. I watched Sarah pull off this sequence last month where she completed three monasteries in two rounds and gained like sixty points plus perfect positioning for the final scoring. Just incredible to watch.
But here’s the trap – and I fell into it hard during my first dozen games. Monasteries look like guaranteed points and they kind of are, but they demand serious resource investment. You can get so focused on monastery completion that you neglect basic board development. I’ve done this more times than I care to admit, chasing monastery bonuses while my opponents quietly build efficient engines that outscore me in the end.
The key insight that really improved my play is treating monasteries as acceleration tools rather than primary strategies. They should amplify what you’re already doing well, not dictate your entire approach. If you’re naturally good at animal collection, find monasteries that reward that. If you excel at city building, look for combinations that support expansion.
Perfect example – there’s a monastery that requires four different animal types. New players see this and immediately start hoarding animals, completely wrong approach. The smart play is pursuing this only if you were already planning heavy animal collection for other reasons. The monastery becomes a bonus for doing what you wanted to do anyway.
The expansion adds new knowledge tiles too, some obviously powerful, others that seem mediocre until you understand monastery interactions. There’s one tile that lets you treat any die as one value higher, sounds minor until you realize how many monastery requirements become trivial with that flexibility. I grabbed that tile in a game last week and it let me complete two monasteries I never would’ve finished otherwise.
I’ve developed this approach I call “flexible specialization” – probably sounds fancier than it is. Pick one core strategy based on your starting setup, but identify two or three monastery paths that could complement it. Let the dice and available tiles determine which path to pursue. This has improved my win rate significantly because I’m not locked into rigid plans that fall apart when the game doesn’t cooperate.
Reading other players’ monastery intentions becomes crucial too. Unlike city building which happens on your individual board, monastery completion affects shared resources. If two players are pursuing similar strategies, someone’s getting squeezed out. Learning to recognize these conflicts early and pivot appropriately separates good players from mediocre ones.
The social dynamics change in interesting ways. Base game rewards efficiency and careful planning, but monastery strategies often require calculated risks. You might need to grab a tile that doesn’t help immediately because it’s crucial for monastery completion three turns away. This creates opportunities for aggressive players to pressure more cautious opponents by competing for key resources.
Linda was skeptical when I first brought this expansion to our weekly game night. She’d gotten comfortable with the base game, knew what she was doing, didn’t want to learn new rules. But after playing it a few times she admits it feels like the complete version of what Castles of Burgundy was trying to achieve. More interconnected, more strategic depth, but still the same core game we enjoyed.
My advice for anyone considering this expansion – treat your first few games as learning experiences rather than trying to win. Focus on understanding how different monasteries work and how they might fit into various strategies. The expansion rewards system knowledge more than quick tactical thinking, so time invested in understanding pays off long-term.
After all these games, the Cloisters expansion has become my preferred way to play. It maintains everything I loved about the original while adding meaningful strategic depth that doesn’t feel like complexity for its own sake. Every new element serves a purpose, creates interesting decisions, and the learning curve is manageable enough that you can jump right in.
I can’t imagine going back to the base game now. This feels like the definitive version, the way Feld intended it to be played. If you enjoy Castles of Burgundy and want to rediscover why you fell in love with it in the first place, this expansion is absolutely worth adding to your collection.
Lawrence’s Phoenix home is half game shelf, half museum. He’s played hundreds of titles and still gets excited about every new box. His posts focus on accessibility, replayability, and helping regular folks find the right game for their table.
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