Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: 5 (of 10)
Components
Monkeys on the Moon comes with:
- 1 tribe track
- 110 cards
- 42 favor coins
- 6 tribe stones
- 1 moonstone
- 1 rulebook
Tribe Track: A single-panel cardboard track that shows the civilization spaces which the monkey tribes advance along, with a list of victory point scores in the middle. It's slightly plain but has attractive stonework on it.
Cards: A motley set of cards, including 6 tribe cards, 18 ship cards, 36 civilization cards, 42 monkey cards, 6 scorn cards, and 2 rules cards. They're a bit of a pain to set up, but generally make sense once you have them all laid out.
The Scott Starkey art on the monkey cards is fair, while everything else is mostly Photoshop backgrounds and clip-art icons. The civilization cards are unfortunately pretty ugly, but nothing actually detracts from the gameplay.
Colors are relatively obvious on the various cards (though the green monkeys sometimes looked black to me) and the important numbers are usually pretty big and easy to see. Different monkey cards had their values in different places, which made it hard to see everything when you had them stacked in a column, but other that that the utility of the cards is OK.
The cards are a little flimsier than I'd like.
Stones & Coins: These are all wood bits. The "favor coins" are weird circular wooden discs with a hole in the middle. They look pretty neat. The tribe stones are just large wooden cubes. They're all well color-coordinated, both with each other and with the tribe, monkey, and ship cards.
Moonstone: A glass stone that marks the first player.
Rulebook: A four-page black-and-white rulebook. It has good examples and a nice setup illustration, and was easy to learn the rules from.
Overall the components of Monkeys on the Moon vary from slightly below average (the flimsy cards) to well above average (the neat wooden bits). The graphic design isn't that great, but all the bits work as they're intended to. It's pretty average for an indie design of this sort, and so I've let it eke in a "3" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Monkeys on the Moon is to gain the most points by launching spaceships and gaining the favor of the most civilized monkey tribes.
Setup: The game starts out with the extensive playing area being laid out. The tribe track is put down and near it the tribe stones, which mark civilization advances. The monkey deck and the ship deck are each laid nearby and a few cards are flipped up to form face-up pools.
The six tribe cards are randomized and formed into a circle which defines alliances and rivals. Three favor coins of the appropriate color are put on each tribe. Scorn cards for the six tribes are also set nearby.
The civilization cards are shuffled, some are discarded from the game, then each player is given two.
Each player also gets a ship which is placed face-up in front of him and one favor coin per tribe.
Allies & Rivals. There are six monkey tribes, arranged in a circle. Each is allied with the two adjacent tribes and is rivals with the opposite tribe.
Moneys. At any time the monkey pool consists of one more monkey card than the number of players. Each monkey has a value from 3-5 and a color matching one of the tribes.
Ships. Each player has a ship in front of them, there are also two more forming a draw pool. Each ship holds 2-4 monkeys and is correspondingly worth 3-5 victory points. Each also has a tribal color, which has nothing to do with what monkeys it can hold (somewhat confusingly), but instead refers to what monkeys are happy to see it launched because of its intrinsic design.
Order of Play: In order, the players jointly take part in three phases of play:
- Civilization Phase
- Bid Phase
- Wrapup
Civilization Phase: A player plays a civilization card. It's color-coded to one of the tribes and advances a tribe 2-5 spaces along the civilization track. The civilization advances are all humorous things. Learning to play the Ukulele gives 4 civilization points while learning to use soap is a 5-point advancement. A civilization card can be played either on the color-coded tribe or one of its allies.
After a player has played the card and advanced the tribe, he takes two favor from them and must return a favor to that tribes' rival. If he can't do the latter he must take the scorn card from the rival (or take scorn from or lose favor to one of the rival's allies, if he already has their scorn).
Monkey Scorn. Monkey scorn is a terrible thing. A player who has a tribe's scorn at the end of the game loses 2 victory points. A player may get rid of it by advancing that tribe's civilization (but he only gets 1 favor coin when he does), by launching one of that tribe's colored ships (but he gets no favor when he does), or by boarding a monkey of that color on a ship (which is harder than it seems because you probably don't have the right colored favor for bidding, as discussed below).
Favors and scorn together form a fairly intricate resource management game, which I'll get to more below.
Bid Phase: After each player has advanced a tribe, now each player gets to put a monkey up for a bid.
The active player chooses one of the monkeys from the face-up monkey pool, and gets to make the first bid. Bidding will then go around the table, with each player either raising or dropping, until there is only one bidder left (who wins the monkey). All bidding is done with favor tokens: the appropriate colored favor for the monkey's tribe is worth 3 bid points and the allied tribe's is worth 2.
After a player gets a monkey, he puts it on his ship, and then it launches if the ship is full. However, if the monkey is a rival of another monkey already on the ship, then the ship launches prematurely and the player instead puts the new monkey on a new ship.
Whenever a ship launches a player gets a favor coin of the same color as the ship. If a ship was launched full, it'll be worth 3-5 victory points at the end of the game. If a ship was launched prematurely, it's not worth victory points.
Wrapup: Each player gets a new civilization card, the monkey pool is refreshed, and the first player marker passes clockwise.
Ending the Game: The civilization cards form a timer. When they've all been drawn, then played, the game ends.
Now all the monkey tribes are ranked from most civilized to least. This generates a pair of scores for each monkey tribe, from 7/4 to 2/1. Next players compare their "status points" for each tribe, which is the value of all the monkeys that they launched in that color. The player with the most status points gets the first score value for the tribe, the player with the second most gets the second.
Each player adds up all his tribal victory points with his ship victory points. The player with the most points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Monkeys on the Moon is a game featuring resource management, majority control, and open auctions.
I was surprised to realize that resource management is really the heart of the game. It's all about managing those little favor coins, figuirng out how to get them with civilization cards, how to avoid scorn, how to pay off scorn, and which coins to use when bidding in auctions. It turns out to be pretty complex and thoughtful because you're balancing a few different resource types at any time, and have both positive and negative possibilities.
The majority control is also crucial, because it ultimately determines victory. It's also pretty complex because the path to get the majority points you want is convoluted. You have to play the right civilization cards to get the right tokens to bid on the right monkeys and then you have to get them on ships such that they won't pre-launch, costing you VPs. Again it's this complexity which makes the majority control aspect standout.
The auction, finally, is differentiated by the same aspect: you have three different currencies that you can bid at any time, and you have to balance their value against your need for those currencies elsewhere. Also, the auctions are very tight, rarely going more than a few bids, and that keeps them interesting.
Overall Jim Doherty has a tendency to make games that have silly themes, yet pretty complex European mechanics. I've also reviewed his Who Stole Ed's Pants? and his The Nacho Incident. In his other games I thought the randomness was a little too high for the complexity to actually pay off. Here the balance here seems just right. Though there are lots of cards, they're all pretty well controlled by the open draw piles, and other players' actions don't throw big monkey wrenches into your plans.
As it were.
Il Principe is another recent game that reminds me of this one. They both feature majority control at the end of several resource management tradeoffs, and an auction besides. They were both hard to wrap my brain around, but ultimately doing so paid off.
The Game Design
Overall, Monkeys on the Moon is a complex, thoughtful game that allows you to really think several steps ahead and rewards it if you do so well. That level of thought may be too much for some players, and I'm not convinced it meshes well with the silly theming, but that's ultimately each player's call.
As I already said in the "relationships" section, I think that every system works pretty well. Strategy is rewarded, and you can try and make clever moves when playing civilization cards and when bidding on monkeys alike.
Overall, I've given Monkeys on the Moon a solid "4" out of "5" for Substance. It's a good game.
Conclusion
Though the theming is silly, Monkeys on the Moon is actually a game of very thoughtful resource management and majority control. It's an indie, no doubt about it, but if you enjoy serious gamer's games, this one will probably delight.
