Monster Hoard — Clear every vault before the Guardian wakes

What is Monster Hoard — Clear every vault before the Guardian wakes

Monster Hoard is an arcade platformer played on fifty fixed vaults, the same fifty for everybody. Each vault is a tower of floors stitched together by ladders, one-way planks and bridges that appear and vanish at the pull of a lever. The rule never changes: the golden gate stays shut until not a single treasure is left on the ground. A vault holds between 10 and 22 treasures, 796 across the whole game, and each is worth 25 points multiplied by your running combo. Monsters walk their floor in a straight line and turn at a wall or at the edge of a drop, so their routes are readable long before you arrive.

The moment the last treasure leaves the floor, the gate opens and the Guardian wakes. It does not patrol. It hunts, climbing ladders, dropping down shafts, taking the shortest route the grid allows. It is always slower than you, a little under half your speed in the first vault and about two thirds of it in the fiftieth, but it never gives up. The clock starts somewhere between 140 and 235 seconds; if it runs out the Guardian comes out anyway and the time bonus is gone.

How to play

1. Move with the arrow keys or A and D, climb ladders with up and down, hold down to drop through planks, and jump with the space bar or Z.
2. Sweep the vault clean first: the golden gate only opens once the treasure counter reaches its total, and standing on it earlier does nothing.
3. Chain treasures less than 2.5 seconds apart to push the combo up to ×8, which turns a 25-point coin into a 200-point one.
4. Reach the gate before the Guardian reaches you, or freeze it for seven seconds with the snowflake; the run ends when your last heart goes out.

Strategies that work

• The combo is the largest source of points and the easiest to waste. Each treasure pays 25 points times the combo, which climbs a step every time you take another within 2.5 seconds, up to ×8. Four tiles take under a second to cross, so clear whole rows in one pass.
• The Guardian only wakes when the last treasure leaves the ground, and even then it stands still for about a second in the early vaults, under half a second from the forty-fifth on. Plan your route so the treasure nearest the golden gate is the one you take last.
• Finishing a vault pays 15 points per second left on the clock plus a flat 500. Leaving the first vault with 149 seconds to spare is worth 2 235 points, far more than the 14 treasures inside it. Speed beats combing the corners for one stray coin.
• The lever flips every bridge, but the game triggers it again every three quarters of a second while you stand on it. In vault 14, with sixteen bridge tiles across its middle floor, waiting on the lever makes the ground blink under your feet. Step on, step off, then look.
• The magnet pulls treasures from about four tiles away for twenty seconds and is the cheapest way to hold a combo together. The boots grant a double jump for the rest of the vault. The snowflake stops monsters and the Guardian for seven seconds, so save it for after the last treasure.

A little history

Monster Hoard was written from scratch for puzzle-me.com and adapts no existing game. It belongs to the arcade climber family of the early eighties, single-screen boards with ladders instead of scrolling levels, and adds two later ideas: a combo counter that rewards a planned route over sheer thoroughness, and a pursuer that only enters once the board is cleared. The fifty vaults are drawn by hand, tile by tile, on a grid 30 columns wide and 18 rows tall, and the Guardian navigates that same grid with a breadth-first search.

Frequently asked questions