In Spin Monkeys, collect fruit that’s right in front of you…
…but you just can’t move forward!
You are a monkey in the jungle when one day a wayward carnival makes a stop. Both you and your fellow monkeys jump in the bumper cars and away you go. You have no idea why there is fruit all over the arena floor, but you aim to grab as much of it for yourself as possible!
Each player starts with a Monkey token at the edge of the board and a hand of 5 cards.
Your Monkey token has 8 directions from 45 degrees to 360 and you have a hand of cards with those 8 points on them.
Movement
On your turn you play a card, rotate your money according and move a number of spaces equal to the number of cards you have in front of you…
So, in this case, you’d turn 90 degrees and move forward 2. Any fruit you move over on the way you collect. If you collect a banana you replace it with a Banana Skin token.
Hit a Banana skin and you flip the top card of the deck and rotate to that direction then keep moving.
If you bump into someone else you steal one of their fruit tokens at random and they rotate equally to a random draw from the top of the deck and use the remaining movement points the active player had. This can chain from one player to another which is quite fun.
As you build up speed you’re bound to hit the side of the board. When you do it costs you cards from your movement stack to turn around back into the board. This also slows you down in future turns.
When one kind of fruit has gone the game ends. You add up the points from your fruit, and most points win.
Spin Monkeys Summary
It’s very simple and very fun. It’s actually quite strategic despite some random elements but it’s a really good balance.
We played this with 5, I’d LOVE to play it with the full 8 to see the chaos!
Jesta ThaRogue