Friday, 16 October 2026

Monster Freeze

· 2025 · Mana Project Studio

Players

1–4

On the box

5min

At our table

4min

Weight Light

Text in the game None

What it is

Monster Freeze is a lightning-fast card game, a sort of tic-tac-toe that everyone plays at the same time, without waiting for their turn. The theme is a cute excuse: it’s cold, and to warm up the little monsters need to huddle together, but only with monsters of their own colour.

Everyone holds three square cards full of holes, with colourful monsters here and there. You rotate them, flip them and stack them, looking for the combination where three monsters of the same colour peek through the holes in a row, straight or diagonal. As soon as you manage it you keep that line in front of you and draw three new cards, and at any moment you can swap one of yours with the face-up card next to the deck.

The first to make a line in every colour wins. There’s nothing to read and nothing to calculate, it’s all about your eye and how fast you see how to fit your cards together.

How it plays

For those five minutes of waiting it’s perfect, the filler par excellence: you open it, play it and put it away in no time.

What I enjoy is the race against the others. Nobody waits for anybody. You look at your three cards, turn them this way and that, and meanwhile keep an eye on the face-up one next to the deck, which might be exactly the piece you’re missing. Whoever spots the fit first completes the line. And the monsters, with those colours, are lovely just to look at.

At our table

Monster Freeze really is a five-minute game, shorter than any filler I’ve ever seen. I’m not even sure I’d call it a board game: we’re close to tic-tac-toe!

4′

at three

Median of our games, by player count. The dashed band is 5′, what the box says.