Game Review: Discipline the Simian

i-d484758b74411f8706a1ff95fe182a72-pic144671_md.jpgPlayed 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 , , ; , , .]

Tags

More like this

My two days with Junior at the LinCon gaming convention in Linköping turned out even better than I'd hoped for. I had lots of fun myself, and as a geek dad I was extra happy that Junior took to the whole thing with such gusto. On Thursday evening, for instance, he was play-testing a convoluted…
Pandemic is a new board game for 1-4 players. The players take on the roles of field operatives for the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA, as four simultaneous pandemics threaten global life and civilisation. It's a collaborative game: either you find cures in time and everybody wins --…
I spent Friday and Saturday with Junior at a small gaming convention in Katrineholm, a town two hours' drive from my home. (I stayed nearby in May of last year with my wife.) With less than 100 participants, not all of whom were there at the same time, it was a friendly and welcoming con where it…
There are two features of games that have always appealed to me. First, the good ones put you in a place where you are explicitly thinking out different ways the future could play out -- the possibilities that are more or less likely given what you know (and what you don't know). Second, many of…

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.

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)!

By Sam the Centipede (not verified) on 15 Jun 2008 #permalink

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.