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Awards

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You Might Like

  • Its not just a game based on Lego, but a game built around Lego
  • Fun for kids and big kids alike.
  • The cute monkey

Might Not Like

  • Limited amount of piece variety
  • The amount of table space needed considering the board itself would fit on any coffee table
  • Never getting to go first because you don’t eat bananas
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Monkey Palace Review

Do you love Lego? Perhaps you are an AFOL (that’s an Adult Fan of Lego by the way… yes, it’s a real thing). You are here so you must love tabletop games. Then just imagine a world where you get to combine the two… That is what Monkey Palace is; a board game build around one of the biggest toy brands in the world. You see the thing is, it cannot be easy to build a game around something as iconic as Lego, knowing that you are not just trying to appease keen gamers, but the Lego lovers as well. We once got Minotaurus, a great little board game using Lego (honestly I can recommend it happily), but one thing it suffered was the feeling of it not feeling like Lego. It could have been designed around anything, it just happened to be Lego. But surely what you want from a great Lego board game, is to not just feel like a great game but feel like you are getting to play with Lego? Well Vicky (one half of Peaches and Meeples) is a self-proclaimed AFOL, so that’s definitely what she was after.

Enter Monkey Palace

At its heart, Monkey Palace is a drafting and placement game, but rather than tiles or dice, you have Lego pieces. However, where it sits apart from many games with similar mechanics, this game encourages you to BUILD! That’s right, BUILD! Those magic words to all AFOLs (and kids who also happen to enjoy Lego), with the sole aim of building the biggest most awesome palace for what can be described as the most ridiculously cute Lego monkey. The aim is to score more points than your opponents and attempt to block them using the mischievous Monkey when and where you can.

There may not be actual bananas, but you get everything you need to play

Inside the box you get one square Lego board; this acts as the base, which all players place and build on. You get two card play area ground mats (double sided), which are essentially the jungle floor for you to play on. This sits on the middle of the Lego board, held in place by four corner Lego pieces. The colours on the ground mat gives you a sense of terrain types, but more on that when we discuss the gameplay. You get a set of cards, which help you score points and draft more pieces to build bigger masterpieces. There are four player boards, which give you places to place drafted cards and helps you keep track of what and how much Lego you get to draft each turn. Finally, and of course most importantly, you get Lego, lots of Lego. You get 3 types of pieces; archways, single blocks and taller column blocks. There’s also a cheeky (but cute) Lego monkey, and a whole load of light green and dark green plant pieces, and some gold nubbins, all of which act as decorations throughout the gameplay. It might not sound like the most variety in pieces, but it is key to the gameplay and doesn’t in anyway dampen the creativity you can employ to build your palace.

So how does it play?

The game instructions walk you through the set up in a simple step by step way. Each player gets a board of their own, which helps them track their resources for drafting and building and holds the cards for scoring later. You choose a ground mat, which impacts the game by determining where the different terrain types are and impact which decorations you play. Helpfully, the instructions tell you to use ground mat one, for you first game. You then place the initial few bricks on the ground mat along with the first decoration. You are then encouraged to place all remaining decorations around the edge of the board and “have fun building a cool jungle with them”. You then place all the various cards somewhere all players can reach them (more on the cards shortly) and place the cute monkey on his card. There are little pieces for expansions to the game play including a butterfly and a frog, but for now we will just focus on the main game with the monkey. When choosing player boards, you better hope you love bananas. Player one is determined by when you last ate a banana, and you take the player board labelled as such. Flip these boards over and you find your starting Lego pieces you get to draft before starting the game (colours don’t matter, just the shapes). You are now set up and ready to go nuts… sorry bananas would probably be a more appropriate food reference for this game.

This is a family game, and the designer has clearly considered this when writing the rules. Just like every great Lego set, the rules are laid out with text and images to help with clarity and understanding, and the turn is outlined in an easy-to-follow step by step guide.

At first, it seems like there is a lot going on in each players turn, outlined as eight steps. But actually, you realise very quickly (and very much slip into the process) that it just follows a simple and straight forward process of; build, decorate, count your monkey credits, spend monkey credits on taking cards, draft any Lego the card tells you to, then draft all the pieces that you will now get every round (this can change as you pick new cards up). Finally, you take a bonus card if you are allowed and place the monkey if you qualify to.

Building rules are cleanly and clearly laid out, showing examples. All staircases (as they are referred to as), must start from the ground mat. You then begin to build up, aiming to create the tallest staircase you can. Once you can no longer build higher, you decorate the end of your staircase (don’t worry, they don’t block the way for other players… Its Lego, you can build on top of them later). The next stage is to count the number of arches you have placed; these give you monkey credits equal to that amount, and if you add a decoration that is higher than previously placed decorations of the same type, you get a bonus monkey credit. You use these to buy cards. Cards are numbered with a monkey credit cost; this does mean you can buy more than one if you have enough (but you don’t get to save them for another round, monkeys are too impatient for that). Each card may give you some instantly draftable pieces of Lego. You have a card score value, appropriately identified with bananas, and at the bottom (and on the back) you have the Lego bricks you get to draft each turn. You then place the cards on the player board, turned over so you can see all the pieces across all cards that you get every turn. However, here’s the cheeky (monkey) bit, you only have four slots for cards, so you very quickly start having to decide which cards to cover, losing their pieces you can draft, and replacing them with new ones. If during your turn you place a gold nubbin as your decoration, you take the monkey card (from your opponent if they already have it) and place the monkey on the palace anywhere you like, hoping to impede your opponents.

Gameplay continues, building higher and higher, until someone can no longer take the pieces they are entitled to. Once the game ends, you get to count the banana value on EVERY card, including those you covered, adding then any bonus card values and of course the all-important monkey card if you have that. The highest score wins.

Final thoughts

Monkey Palace is a really fun little game. Ideal for families with young children (especially Lego fans) but also the big kids and AFOLs amongst us. The game play mechanics offer an interesting gateway to the more interesting game play styles, that may help you introduce children to something beyond roll and move styled games. But even if you don’t have children, this game offers a fun experience that can very quickly turn competitive as you try build the biggest staircase possible.

But the crowning jewel of Monkey Palace has to be, it is not just fun well designed little game, but it ultimately, and importantly, feels like you’re playing with Lego! You don’t feel like this game could be made from anything, but in fact the Lego is at the core of the gameplay. The designer wanted you feel like you had a Lego kit, that every time you got it out of the box, the gameplay allowed each and every single experience to be unique, but familiar. The only thing that could improve the game is more variety of pieces. Because the limited number of pieces, you do feel like each palace essentially looks the same, even it is unique in its construction, but that shouldn’t put you off. If you are looking a fun family game, or a gift for the AFOL in your life, this is a real winner.

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You might like

  • Its not just a game based on Lego, but a game built around Lego
  • Fun for kids and big kids alike.
  • The cute monkey

Might not like

  • Limited amount of piece variety
  • The amount of table space needed considering the board itself would fit on any coffee table
  • Never getting to go first because you dont eat bananas

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