Played a fun card game with a somewhat off-colour name today: Spank the Monkey from 2003. The object of the game is literally to catch a monkey and whack its little hairy behind. Why? Because all the players are employees at a junk yard, and the monkey’s being a nuisance. It’s built itself a tower of junk and sits atop it, making ugly gestures, screeching and probably flinging poo at the customers. To catch it, you need to build a junk tower of your own while keeping the other players from building faster than you and catching the monkey.

Much of the fun stems from the absurd combinations of objects you end up with. One of the towers built today incorporated an automatic rodeo bull and a dinosaur skeleton reinforced with chicken wire. At one point a player lobbed an anvil at another’s tower, but he deflected it with an old trampoline, and instead I ended up getting whacked with the anvil. Good fun, each session lasting a few tens of minutes once everybody knows the rules. Though developed by Swedes, the game’s entirely in English. It’s not a “collectible” card game: you buy one box of cards and that’s it.

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