Dr Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
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.
[More blog entries about games, gaming, spankthemonkey; spel, kortspel, spankthemonkey.]
Comments
good to know! always looking for anthro-related games...well games in general, but monkeys make everything better! hopefully i can find a copy here in the States.
Posted by: megan | June 15, 2008 4:09 PM
Take care if you go to Britain (and quite possibly other English-speaking countries for all I know) and suggest to your new friends that you'd like to "spank the monkey" with them without making clear that this is a Swedish card game rather than the vice of Onan (as colloquial usage has - or had - it)!
Posted by: Sam the Centipede | June 16, 2008 2:36 AM
There is a Swedish version of this game as well.
There's also a recent expantion that introduces some more cards and a few new concepts to the game, but I haven't had the opportunity to try that out yet.
Posted by: Hans Persson | June 16, 2008 5:02 AM